[jifty-devel] Jifty REST and PATCH

[Piers Cawley]

On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 7:47 PM, Jesse Vincent <jesse at bestpractical.com> wrote:
> http://bitworking.org/news/298/Considering-PATCH
>
>  Should we support PATCH? What would it look like?
>
>  Thoughts, comments?

My gut feeling in this has been to consider representing the various
fields in a resource as sub resources, possibly with url templates to
allow for atomically changing multiple fields. So, say there's your
typical blog post which has fields like is_published, title, body,
excerpt, these would be accessed individually as, say:

/2008/02/22/to-patch-or-not-to-patch/fields/body
/2008/02/22/to-patch-or-not-to-patch/fields/is_published;title

These would be dealt with via the usual REST semantics, and would be
available in the usual representations. Given that basic framework of
subresources, a full on PATCH would hopefully be less necessary.
However, where it makes sense, I'd think about supporting patch with
something like:

PATCH /2008/02/22/to-patch-or-not-to-patch/fields/body.textile
Host: whatever
Content-Type: text/x-unified-diff

<unified diff for the body element>

However, I'm shooting from the hip here...