Confused whether to use PUT or PATCH or POST in your API? Don't worry you are not alone and this is a common confusion which happens to most of us or to all of us at some point while developing our API. Before we understand the difference between PUT vs PATCH vs POST, first we need to understand Idempotency.

Representational state transfer (REST) is a an architectural style designed to take advantage of existing protocols like HTTP/HTTPS. REST defines a set of constraints to be used for creating APIs. When an API is designed based on the principles which adheres to the Representational state transfer architectural style it is called a RESTful API. Unlike SOAP services, RESTful APIs are not constrained to one particular data type like XML. Instead, RESTful APIs can return any type of data format like JSON, YAML, XML, TEXT etc depending on the client request.

It is challenging to design a RESTful API which follows the REST principles and attains the maximum level in Richardson maturity model for rest. Most of the enterprise APIs do not follow any of the REST standards or they implements the minimal principles and yet they are named REST API. Such a poorly designed API is an insult to be named as REST API. As a developer, please do not design such an API.

Understanding the URI Parameter and Query Parameter How many times have you wondered whether to use query parameter or URI parameter when designing an API. Lets understand the difference. As an API developer, you would have designed an API to get a collection of resource, filter the resource or do some action on an instance resource. It is important to understand when to use a query parameter and uri parameter. They both serve different purpose.