I'm writting a RESTful api, and at I'm thinking about the process of a user creating a key. I have the following possibilities:
/new/<keyname>
- although it's very easy I think I won't use this, because I heard GET is for retrieving and/or listing information;/<keyname>
- This seemed to me easy and simple enough, but does not pass any data in the request body. Can I do it this way ? Is this weird ?/keys
passing in the request body "keyname=SomeKey"
- Is this the correct way ?I looked at this API from joyent and in all their PUT and POST requests they pass some data in the request body. Is this expected ? Is it really wrong not to require a request body in a PUT and POST request ?
I asked this question on the Http-WG. This was the most precise answer I got:
It's important to note that a message without a body can still carry a representation, because a representation is the combination of the body (which can be zero-length) and headers.
See:
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-httpbis-p3-payload-11#section-4
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg/2010JulSep/0276.html
In summary, POST does not require a body. I would expect the same justification can be applied to PUT.