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Tuesday, January 10. 2006

More RESTful mumblings: PUT and DELETE don't work in a form request method.

Just a quick note whilst I am mumbling about REST.

It appears that PUT and DELETE methods inside of a form are not supported by most browsers out there. Which makes sense, because the html specification says that the method should only be GET or POST.

So when building your RESTful application, you're stuck either using POST for everything (which isn't really that RESTful) or AJAX, because XmlHttpRequest does handle PUT and DELETE.
Posted by jonnay in Code at 16:43 | Comments (5) | Trackbacks (0)
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Since XmlHttpRequest() supports PUT and GET, it might be just the trick to build a browser-based REST API testing tool. Do you know if anyone has built such a thing? I might have to do it myself?

It's not crucial though, because I have tweaked my own REST handler (built in ColdFusion) to look for a URL/Form/Header param called X-Rest-Method and override the actual method with whatever is specified there. That way I can at least do basic testing with PUT and DELETE. Unfortunately I can't send a body with the PUT - that's why an AJAX REST tester would be helpful...

Do you have any tools that you use to test your REST framework?
#1 Avi Flax (Link) on 2006-02-06 10:03 (Reply)
I really like the idea of a URL/Form/Header parameter called X-Rest-Method. I think I'll introduce that into the next version of Meditation.

Currently I have a small test framework for meditation using AJAX at http://bunny.jonnay.net/projects/Meditation/test/gate.php . It is built to test the 3rd party application and user authentication. It uses a chunk of Javascript I call Koi, which is cross platform, and handles PUT and DELETE quite nicely, though I want to give it a little more beef.

cURL is an invaluable tool for testing a REST framework. Check out my entry on it here: http://blog.jonnay.net/archives/587-Debugging-Restuful-Ajax...-Part-Deux..html
#1.1 Jonnay (Link) on 2006-02-06 16:13 (Reply)
Jonnay, I'm glad you like the idea. Could you do me a favor and hold off on talking about the feature for a bit? I'd like to publish it on our company blog first - which we're about to launch.

Your test framework looks impressive, but I'm thinking of something a little simpler and more general-purpose. Maybe I'll try whipping something up to illustrate.

Yeah, cURL rocks. I've used it on my Mac, ever since I saw the examples in the Backpack API. For some reason I didn't think of using it in my Windows system at work, and I've been using PuTTY instead - but honestly it's a bit of a pain. I just downloaded cURL and I'll probably switch to it for my low-level REST debugging.

Thanks for the interesting thoughts and discourse - I've added your feed to my reader (FeedLounge). Later!
Avi
#1.1.1 Avi Flax (Link) on 2006-02-07 09:40 (Reply)
Oops, I didn't realize I couldn't use any HTML here - I had linked Backpack and PuTTY and FeedLounge -- oh well, I guess Google will have to suffice.
#1.1.1.1 Avi Flax (Link) on 2006-02-07 09:42 (Reply)
Sure, I stuffed it in a Todo item on the wiki, but it doesn't get wide exposure (yet). I've already credited you with the idea, should I credit your company as well?

PuTTY is good shit. I love it. A General Purpose AJAX REST debugger application would oh-so-totally kick the bum, and it wouldn't be too hard to build.
#1.1.1.2 Jonnay (Link) on 2006-02-07 15:04 (Reply)

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