Simon Willison’s Weblog

Implementing Stripe-like Idempotency Keys in Postgres (via) Having clients send “idempotency keys” with API requests in order to be able to safely retry them if something’s goes wrong is a really neat trick for making transactional APIs more robust. Here Brandur Leach talks implementation strategies.

# 27th October 2017, 5:51 pm / api-design, idempotency, postgresql, brandur-leach, stripe

REST, I just don’t get it. Read the comments for some excellent practical reasons to care about REST, including cache management (PUT and DELETE can expire the cache entries for the corresponding GET), the ability to add or move parts of the server API without redeploying client libraries and the idempotency of GET / PUT / DELETE and HEAD (repeated POST operations may have side-effects).

# 15th August 2008, 8:20 am / caching, damien-katz, delete, get, idempotency, post, put, rest