RESTful Java Web Services, Second Edition

Overriding HTTP methods

Due to security reasons, some corporate firewalls (HTTP proxies) support only the POST and GET methods. This restriction forces a REST API client to use only those HTTP methods that are allowed through the firewall. RESTful web API implementations can work around this restriction by letting the client override the HTTP method via the custom X-HTTP-Method-Override HTTP header. The REST API client can specify an X-HTTP-Method-Override request header with a string value containing either PUT, PATCH, or DELETE. When the server gets the request, the server replaces the POST method call with the method string value set for X-HTTP-Method-Override.

JAX-RS allows you to implement this behavior via prematching javax.ws.rs.container.ContainerRequestFilter ...