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by digitallimit 5155 days ago
I'd appreciate other people's input on these choices. I'm currently implementing an API much in the way of these standards, but I'm almost buckling and implementing PATCH since I feel dirty having PUT do so much, so incorrectly.
2 comments
richardlblair 5155 days ago
You have to analyze your target audience. Will people who are new to using a restful api being using your api? Will you provide a wrapper yourself?

There are about a million questions you must ask yourself in order to come to the right answer for YOU. At the end of the day what matters is that the person using your API finds it easy and intuitive. If that means that you use PUT for updates, and POST for creation, so be it. It could even mean that you convert PUT to POST requests, and treat them all the same. If you take that route, you check to see if the resource ID is specified in the post data. If the ID is in there, you update that resource, if it's not in there you create a new resource.

While you go forward, keep in mind one thing. If your API is hard to use then no one will use it. If no one uses it, then your API doesn't matter. If your API doesn't matter, then you made all the wrong decisions.

Also, have fun with it. Creating APIs is incredibly fun, enjoy yourself, and enjoy creating something people will enjoy using.

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thelarry 5155 days ago
One thing to keep in mind about wrappers is that now a days kids like accessing APIs from mobile applications. With iOS you cannot simply just wrap curl calls like you would in PHP. Developers use weird and random REST API accessing frameworks in iOS.
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richardlblair 5155 days ago
I would be interested in finding out more about these REST API accessing frameworks in iOS. Do you have any links?
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thelarry 5155 days ago
Just off the top of my head I know of https://github.com/AFNetworking/AFNetworking, http://allseeing-i.com/ASIHTTPRequest/ (no longer supported but still used), and http://restkit.org/
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pfraze 5155 days ago
Is it feasible to create subresources for each partial put? For instance, if the `/person/:id` resource has an address as part of the data, could you do PUT `/person/:id/address` to only overwrite the address?
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