[naasking]

> So it's usually POST resource/:id/action and that's fine.

There's nothing wrong with that. It's not anti-REST or anything, assuming you satisfy the other REST constraints, ie. each request is self-contained and any stateful resources are designated by URLs.

As an aside, I'm personally not a huge fan of human-readable URLs because it encourages API consumers to rely on/construct URLs client-side, which is not REST.

[wtbob]

I think a more properly-REST approach would be to PUT a representation of the resource with the action applied. That is, rather than POSTing to /resources/:id/close, one would PUT a closed version of the resource to /resources/:id.

[naasking]

I don't see why that would be more REST. POST is to be used for side-effecting operations, PUT is an optimization over POST for idempotent effectful operations.

Certainly a PUT solution might have some advantages for replayability in case of network partitions, but REST doesn't this choice dictate one way or the other.