HTTP method to represent "fire and forget" actions in RESTful service

Question

Thinking about REST, it's relatively easy to map HTTP methods to CRUD actions: POST for create, GET for read, etc. But what about "fire and forget" actions? What HTTP method would best represent a fire and forget action such as triggering a batch job (in which no response is sent back to the caller)?

POST would spring to mind, but I think GET is also an appropriate method because 99% of the time you only supply a bunch of parameters to these types of actions. What do you think?

Answer 1

POST would spring to mind, but I think GET is a more appropriate method because 99% of the time you only supply a bunch of parameters to these types of actions. What do you think?

External State

I think that the number of parameters you use has nothing to do with the verb you use. The key issue is are you changing externally visible state?

BatchJob Resources

In your example, if the batch job does not affect the externally visible state of any object then you could implement it as a batch job. However you could model your batch job as a resource with an associated resource container.

You could use a Post to create a new BatchJob resource and allow the user to do a GET to see the progress of the job so far. You could do a GET on the resource container to list all of the running batch jobs, possibly calling DELETE to kill one.