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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-18T02:45:51+00:00

I’ve been reading up on REST web services and would like to implement a

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I’ve been reading up on REST web services and would like to implement a rest service of my own.

All the examples on the internet that I’ve seen relate to database access. But what I want to achieve has nothing to do with accessing a database.

I want to create a REST service that allows a large string and various other parameters to be passed into a resource and it return a xml result set back. Nothing is created or updated into a database, nothing is retrieved from a database. Its passing data to a complex processing procedure to then return the results.

My problem lies with what VERB do I use?

I feel I should use the GET verb to stay in line with best practices but the query could potentially be very large sometimes and passing this on the querystring is in practical.

This leaves me with POST. This seems to fit what I want to acheive but I think it breaks away from REST best practices again!

Is REST only to be used when wanting to interact with a database?

Should I scrap the idea of using rest and create a SOAP service?

UPDATE my REST service is to analyse articles and return keyword reports for the given article. Given this then the resource is ‘keywords’, a POST to this will return a full report. I was thinking then of a second uri of keywords/recommended, a POST to this will return a few recommended key phrases of the submitted article. Does this comply with REST?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    REST does not require a database, if fact REST has nothing to do with databases.

    The scenario you describe is exactly what POST is intended to do. Quoting from the latest revision of the HTTP specs:

    The POST method is used to request
    that the origin server accept the
    representation enclosed in the request
    as data to be processed by the target
    resource.resource.

    You could do something like:

    POST /ArticleProcessor
Content-Type: text/plain

    to send up your article text, and the response could be:

    Status: 200 OK
Content-Type:application/xhtml

<html>
<title>Results of keyword processing</title>
<body>
<a rel="FullReport" href="/reports/2343434/full">Full Report</a>
<a rel="TopKeywords" href="/reports/2343434/top">Top Keywords</a>
</body>
</html>
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