Web Dev Everyday - 17th September 2024🖥️

Welcome to Web Dev Everyday – your daily dose of 3 minute web development emails.

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🎯 Tip of the day

9 HTTP Request methods

1. GET

• Purpose: Retrieves data from a server without modifying it.

• Example: GET /api/products - Returns all product data.

• Use Case: When you need to fetch data, like displaying a product list or details.

2. POST

• Purpose: Sends data to the server to create a new resource.

• Example: POST /api/orders - Creates a new order.

• Use Case: When you want to submit new data to the server, such as placing a new order.

3. PUT

• Purpose: Updates an existing resource entirely.

• Example: PUT /api/orders/789 - Updates order data with ID 789.

• Use Case: When you need to update the entire order information, such as modifying order details.

4. PATCH

• Purpose: Updates part of an existing resource (partial updates).

• Example: PATCH /api/users/567 { "email": "[email protected]" } - Updates the email for user 567.

• Use Case: When you want to change specific fields, such as updating a user’s email address.

5. DELETE

• Purpose: Deletes a resource.

• Example: DELETE /api/products/345 - Deletes the product with ID 345.

• Use Case: When you need to remove a resource, like deleting a product or user.

Okay that was easy? Let’s go with rare ones.

6. HEAD

• Purpose: Similar to GET, but only returns the headers and no body.

• Example: HEAD /api/orders - Checks if the orders resource exists without returning order data.

• Use Case: To check the existence of a resource or retrieve metadata without the full data load.

7. OPTIONS

• Purpose: Describes the communication options for a given URL.

• Example: OPTIONS /api/users - Returns the permitted HTTP methods for the users resource.

• Use Case: To discover the supported HTTP methods for interacting with a specific resource.

8. TRACE

• Purpose: Used for diagnostic purposes; echoes back the received request.

• Example: TRACE /api/login - Returns the exact login request that the client sent.

• Use Case: For debugging, allowing clients to see if there are any changes made to their request during transmission.

9. CONNECT

• Purpose: Establishes a tunnel for communication between the client and the server.

• Example: CONNECT api.example.com:443 HTTP/1.1 - Connects to the specified URL via HTTPS.

• Use Case: Typically used to establish secure connections, like tunneling HTTPS requests.