ruby on rails - Which browser support REST completely. Means Get,Post,PUT and DELETE method?

Question

Which browser support REST completely? Means Get,Post,PUT and DELETE method?

I understood the rails way to understand PUT and DELETE is "_method" hidden variable like

  <form id="form_id" action="" method="PUT" >
   -- form content --
   </form>

method="PUT"?

Or am I thinking wrong?

Answer 1

In many REST frameworks calling the HTTP PUT or DELETE operations from a browser can be achieved through what is known as an "Overloaded POST". What this means is you submit the request from the browser to the server as a POST request with some information appended to the URL specifying the actual HTTP method that should be used.

I know that the Restlet framework for Java follows this approach and I believe Rails does as well.

So if you have a REST API defineed like this:

• POST - http://myservice/myobject -> creates a new object and returns the object id
• GET - http://myservice/myobject/id -> returns the object
• PUT - http://myservice/myobject/id -> updates the object
• DELETE - http://myservice/myobject/id -> deletes the object

using Overloaded POST from the browser you could also

• POST - http://myservice/myobject/id?method=PUT -> updates the object
• POST - http://myservice/myobject/id?method=DELETE -> deletes the object

In fact, for Flex which does not support PUT or DELETE, this is the only way to call these REST operations.