RESTful services and update operations
- by Igor Brejc
I know REST is meant to be resource-oriented, which roughly translates to CRUD operations on these resources using standard HTTP methods. But what I just wanted to update a part of a resource?
For example, let's say I have Payment resource and I wanted to mark its status as "paid". I don't want to POST the whole Payment object through HTTP (sometimes I don't even have all the data).
What would be the RESTful way of doing this? I've seen that Twitter uses the following approach for updating Twitter statuses:
http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/update.xml?status=playing with cURL and the Twitter API
Is this approach in "the spirit" of REST?
UPDATE: PUT - POST
Some links I found in the meantime:
PUT or POST: The REST of the Story
PUT is not UPDATE
PATCH Method for HTTP