Book Image

RESTful Java Web Services, Second Edition

Book Image

RESTful Java Web Services, Second Edition

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (17 chapters)
RESTful Java Web Services Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Implementing partial update


When a client changes only one part of the resource, you can optimize the entire update process by allowing the client to send only the modified part to the server, thereby saving the bandwidth and server resources. RFC 5789 proposes a solution for this use case via a new HTTP method called PATCH. To learn more about this RFC, visit https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5789. Note that PATCH is not yet officially a part of HTTP/1.1. However, the HTTP protocol allows both the client and the server to implement any new method. Leveraging this flexibility, many vendors have started supporting the HTTP PATCH method.

The PATCH method takes the following form:

PATCH /departments/10 HTTP/1.1
[Description of changes]

The [Description of changes] section, in the preceding PATCH method, contains instructions describing how a resource currently residing on the origin server should be modified in order to reflect the changes performed by the client. RFC 6902 defines a JSON document...