Question

Thanks for looking!

Background

I am building a strictly machine-to-machine web-service (restful) application. The application will listen for requests, retrieve data, construct objects, serialize to JSON and return the JSON object.

This application will ultimately be used by other web applications as well as iOS apps, Android apps, and even desktop apps.

The existing code that I have inherited makes a distinction based on how the service was called in terms of HTTP verbs (GET, POST, etc).

Question

In this day and age of machine-to-machine communication, is the HTTP verb even relevant any longer? Could it in fact be constraining for future adoption of the service API to base the code around HTTP verbs?

Update

fmgp provides a clear answer to "why" these verbs are used, but I feel should I clarify my concern:

Will other platforms such as iOS or Android (for example) be able to originate HTTP verb-based calls like GET and POST? If the answer is "no" then I assume that we should stay away from relying on these verbs and instead build the desired action into the request URL as a parameter.

Answer 1

In RestFul applications, you have a verb foreach CRUD operation:

• Create: POST
• Read: GET
• Update: PUT
• Delete: DELETE

Everything claimed “restful” will work the same way according to this philosophy.

There’s nothing standard in that, just a clean, good designed, easy to understand programming style. Of course you may want to do all operation with only GET and some query parameters as soon as your client and server can handle it.