Jon Udell's article End HTTP abuse | InfoWorld | Column | 2005-04-20 | By Jon Udell descibes a criticism of some popular web-based services for using GET when they should have used POST (because there were side effects that changed data), thus they broke the RESTful rules. It is intesting that even in the very simple space of HTTP (where there are only four possibilities: GET, POST, PUT and DELETE) popular services (Bloglines, Flickr, and del.icio.us) don't follow the basic rules for RESTful services. Jon argues it may be because the lightweight programming toolkits (e.g. Python, Perl and JavaScript) support GET more easily than PUT (and he gives examples of what he means here). So potentially these services were simply trying to make it as easy as possible for people to integrate with their services, and the fault lies in the toolkits that should make it even simpler to use POST than is is now, thus removing any excuse for not following the RESTful rules.
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