RE: REST and DELETE?

Dan Stromberg wrote:
> There's something I'm not getting about REST.
> We're supposed to use HTTP verbs like GET, PUT, POST and DELETE.
> But we're also supposed to be avoiding server state, like sessions.
> How can we have a stateless protocol (that is, a protocol in which
> all state is saved in the client, using the REST hierarchy as a
> sort of state machine), that supports a DELETE operation? Are some
> HTTP verbs more RESTful than others?  It seems like PUT, POST and
> DELETE are all about storing state on the server.

Resource state is not the same as application state. The former is generally under the control of servers and the latter should be maintained by the client using standardized methods (which exchange representations) on uniform identifiers to advance from one application state to another. See http://www.infoq.com/articles/mark-baker-hypermedia, for example, for a more in-depth discussion.


Robert Brewer
[email protected]