PUT and DELETE with database application with Laravel

Question

I do not see the purpose behind the PUT and DELETE http verbs. I have seen a tutorial at https://scotch.io/tutorials/simple-laravel-crud-with-resource-controllers and have not seen the power of a PUT nor DELETE methods when to it comes to a database based application. Why would I bother to write a PUT route in my application when I paste in the exact same code into a POST route in my application?

Answer 1

There's no particular power to using one over another, the benefit here is mostly semantic.

Although REST conventions are not enforced, those conventions are used to offer a "standardized" way of accessing RESTful resources (though the accepted norm may differ slightly for different people).

The HTTP methods (verbs) used by RESTful web services are defined by RFC2616. According to that definition the verbs do hold some inherent semantic value:

By definition the PUT and DELETE methods are idempotent (meaning that the result of a particular request using that method will be the same each time your run it), while POST requests on the other hand are not.

Consider some of the routes generated by Laravel's Route::resource() method:

+--------+---------------------+------------------+-------------------------------+
| Method | URI                 | Name             | Action                        |
+--------+---------------------+------------------+-------------------------------+
| POST   | resource            | resource.store   | ResourceController@store      |
| GET    | resource/{resource} | resource.show    | ResourceController@show       |
| PUT    | resource/{resource} | resource.update  | ResourceController@update     |
| DELETE | resource/{resource} | resource.destroy | ResourceController@destroy    |
+--------+---------------------+------------------+-------------------------------+

The route with the POST method will create a new resource entry so it requires no unique identifier to be specified in the route, but if you look at the other three definitions you can see the semantic value of using specific methods to make requests on the same resource. So if you were to make a request to:

http://domain.com/resource/1

The request would do different things depending on the HTTP method:

• GET will will return the resource with ID 1
• PUT will will modify/update the resource with ID 1
• DELETE will will destroy the resource with ID 1

This means that regardless if your resource is puppies, cars or documents, you know that using different verbs on the same URL will have expected effects.

This is not a standard you're required to code by, it's just something that a lot of people agree with. And since Laravel in some respects is an opinionated framework, it offers this particular way of handling resources out of the box.

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Of course there's nothing stopping you from using POST for all routes, as that would work just fine (you'd need a different URL path for each action but in the end the result would be the same).