POST Tunneling: HTTP DELETE and PUT requests with JQuery and Django-Piston | Hacker News Reader

POST Tunneling: HTTP DELETE and PUT requests with JQuery and Django-Piston

pdobson.com

7 pointspadobson3 comments

Whilst a nice little article, I need to point out a factual error.

    The problem with consuming a REST API with client-side
    Javascript with AJAX is that most browsers only give
    access to two HTTP request methods - GET and POST

All modern-ish browsers as far back as Firefox 3 and IE 6 support other HTTP methods when called via JavaScript [1]. It's HTML forms where support for different methods is not present. If you have an app that relies on JS you can just use the relevant methods in your .ajax() call.

You can check what methods your browser supports here [2] (JS heavy page, may slow down your browser)

[1] http://www.mnot.net/javascript/xmlhttprequest/

[2] http://annevankesteren.nl/2007/10/http-method-support

Thanks for the heads up. Both of the clients I mentioned needed to support IE8, and I couldn't find any reliable info on AJAX support of PUT and DELETE. This seemed like the most reliable way to get it done. I'll do a follow-up post on testing the major browsers for PUT and DELETE.

That would be very useful. I struggled to find references to back up my statement, as the jQuery docs for .ajax() only has a vague "other methods may not be supported in all browsers" - with no further details.

A simple table showing browser support for different methods in .ajax() calls would help a lot!

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