Programming Social Applications

PUT Request

Even though there are many web services that support only a subset of the RESTful architecture—GET and POST requests—fully RESTful services include PUT and DELETE requests as well.

PUT requests are a method for inserting new resources into a service. This request type is very similar to a POST request in technical implementation, and the two requests are often confused with each other.

In PHP, we will once again use a cURL request with some options set:

<?php
$url = 'http://www.example.com/request.php';
$postvals = 'firstName=John&lastName=Smith';

$ch = curl_init($url);
$options = array(
   CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST => 'PUT',
   CURLOPT_URL => $url,
   CURLOPT_POST => 1,
   CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS => $postvals,
   CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER => array('Content-Length: ' . strlen($postvals)),
   CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => 1
);
curl_setopt_array($ch, $options);
$response = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
?>

This request mimics that of the POST request, except that we set a different CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST value (PUT). In this example, we can also set an HTTP header with the content length of the POSTed fields if required.

In Python, this request is a little trickier because there are a few quirks to making requests with urllib2:

import urllib import urllib2 url = 'http://www.example.com/request.py' postvals = {'first_name': 'John', 'last_name': 'Smith'} params = urllib.urlencode(postvals) opener = urllib2.build_opener(urllib2.HTTPHandler) request = urllib2.Request(url, data=params) request.add_header('Content-Type', ...