[hlandau]

Let's suppose that I have an HTTP endpoint for a doorbell (for some reason). The doorbell resource is represented as http://example.com/doorbell.

There's no RING HTTP method, and I could invent one, but heaven knows if various HTTP middleware would be happy with that. In practice, people do something like

    POST http://example.com/doorbell/ring

The problem with this is that you now have a hierarchy of verbs; you have first class verbs (GET, PUT, POST, PATCH, DELETE), and second class verbs which have to be represented as distinct resources. This feels like a hack to me.

[k__]

Ah okay.

But isn't this basically what RPC vs REST boils down to?

As far as I know people tried the RPC way for years then gave up on it and started doing REST. Seemingly because inventing a whole bunch of methods was inherently flawed.