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by alt227 655 days ago
> Surprisingly less than 5% of APIs reliably use PATCH.

When I started building my companies main api about 8 or 9 years ago, PATCH was nowhere to be seen. The advice was PUT for creating and POST for updating. some resources had it the other way around, but it was always PUT and POST. I am surprised to see PUT has now been deprecated in favour of PATCH, but I fear that making a new version of the api just to swap 2 methods is unecessary.
3 comments
LargeWu 655 days ago
The difference between PUT and PATCH, at least in convention, is that PUT tends to assume you are providing the entire object of whatever it is you're updating, and PATCH will accept a partial object and combine it with whatever's already there.

A common difference between POST and PUT is that POST is often used for non-idempotent actions (creating a resource), and PUT for idempotent actions (updating or upserting a resource). Of course this is also purely convention; nothing in the implementation of either enforces that usage

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n_plus_1_acc 655 days ago
I've seen both PIT and PATCH used side-by-side, where put is a complete replacement and patch is where to, well, patch only what you need, sometimes using the JSON-patch format.
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KronisLV 653 days ago
> I am surprised to see PUT has now been deprecated in favour of PATCH...

Wait, what? Is that an "official" thing anywhere in regards to the method itself, or just an observation with the APIs that you've worked on?

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