What we really need is a set of verbs that allow to reliably distinguish between these three types of operations:
1. Pure read.
2. Impure (stateful) read.
3. Idempotent write.
4. Any other write.
There's no particular reason to separate inserts, updates, deletes etc as part of the protocol - they're all just different kinds of writes, and middleware doesn't derive any benefit from being able to distinguish them. Thus, this can be a part of the payload.
On the other hand, the difference between reads and writes, and the two subdivisions within each, do matter for purposes such as caching and automated error recovery (e.g. a proxy can repeat an idempotent write a few times before returning the error to the originator of the request).
In REST, we have GET for #1 and #2, PUT and DELETE for #3, and POST for #4. In practice, this is often simplified to just POST used for both #3 and #4, but that loses a valuable distinction (but is unfortunately often necessary because of the lack of support for other methods). On the other hand, the PUT/DELETE distinction is largely pointless.
1. Pure read.
2. Impure (stateful) read.
3. Idempotent write.
4. Any other write.
There's no particular reason to separate inserts, updates, deletes etc as part of the protocol - they're all just different kinds of writes, and middleware doesn't derive any benefit from being able to distinguish them. Thus, this can be a part of the payload.
On the other hand, the difference between reads and writes, and the two subdivisions within each, do matter for purposes such as caching and automated error recovery (e.g. a proxy can repeat an idempotent write a few times before returning the error to the originator of the request).
In REST, we have GET for #1 and #2, PUT and DELETE for #3, and POST for #4. In practice, this is often simplified to just POST used for both #3 and #4, but that loses a valuable distinction (but is unfortunately often necessary because of the lack of support for other methods). On the other hand, the PUT/DELETE distinction is largely pointless.