JSON Patch

I'm probably missing a use case here, but with the JSON Pointer spec they use feeling so "URL-y", couldn't you skip the whole meta-json syntax? So rather than doing

    HTTP/1.1 PATCH /user
    Content-Type: application/json-patch+json

    [
      {
        "op": "replace",
        "path": "/username",
        "value": "bob"
      }
    ]

why not

    HTTP/1.1 PATCH /user/username
    Content-Type: application/json

    "bob"

I feel like you could pretty sensibly implement replace/delete/append with that.

Edit: "test" and "copy" from the json patch spec are unique! So there is those, as well as doing multiple edits all at once in a sort of "transaction".

And then you'd be limited to only one change at the time and lose the benefit of making lot of changes with one request.

I do get that, just saw the "test" op, to either pass or fail the whole change as a sort of transaction. That is really neat.

But I just find that the 1 by 1 approach is easier to reason about if you're opening this up to the internet. I'd personally feel more comfortable with the security model of 1 URL + Session => 1 JSON key.

$WORK project heavily utilizes the test op to enable atomic updates to objects across multiple competing clients. It winds up working really well for that purpose.