Resources can change over time, for example our login page could have
interface updates, but their resource identifiers should remain valid.
Licensed to Menshu You
Zend Framework in Action (Ch01) Manning Publications Co. 29
Of course having a lot of resources doesn??™t hold a great deal of value unless we can actually do something
with them and in the case of web services we have the HTTP methods. To illustrate the value that such
apparently simple operations have Table 11.2 compares the HTTP methods POST, GET, PUT and DELETE
with the common generic database operations; Create, Read, Update and Delete (CRUD).
HTTP Methods Database Operations
POST Create
GET Read
PUT Update
DELETE Delete
Table 11.2 Comparing the HTTP Methods used in REST with the common generic database operations
All readers of this book will be familiar with the POST and GET HTTP request methods whereas PUT and
DELETE are less well known, partly as they are not often implemented by all HTTP servers. This limitation is
reflected in Zend_Rest with the fact that Zend_Rest_Client is able to send all of these request methods while
Zend_Rest_Server will only respond to GET and POST.
Presuming that readers will already have enough knowledge of HTTP to be able to ???join the dots??? on the
fundamentals, we have kept this introduction to REST intentionally brief.
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