Parsing PUT data

Let me be clear: I'm not suggesting we should ignore useful functionality
because of poor design decisions made in the past but I am saying that we
should avoid compounding those mistakes by building on top of them. Would a
$_PUT superglobal be helpful? Sure. But is it a good solution to underlying
problem? Not really.

it's a common problem;

I can agree with this -- PUT's use is widespread and adding support is
probably sensible. That said, your other arguments don't hold much water:

I did originally.

An inability on your part to write working code doesn't equate to "PHP
should implement this for me"

it would a require very wide set of test cases to ensure it won't break
in some random edge case

The need for testing doesn't diminish if the parsing is implemented in C
vs. PHP

Multipart support for PUT was literally the only issue I personally
encountered when writing a public REST API in PHP.

Are you sure you didn't need it for your RESTful PATCH requests too:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5789

And what happened when you implemented Expect: 100-continue headers in your
RESTful requests?

Basically, if you're suggesting that adding $_PUT would solve all of PHP's
problems with full HTTP protocol support then I can't agree.

Thanks Daniel. My thoughts on your response:

Where does it stop? This is the problem I see with all the requests to
support for PUT similarly to POST.

Right here with PUT. Providing a RESTful interface is hugely common and
$_PUT is the only one missing to complete REST. PUT is the glaringly
obvious one missing.

You could easily write a parser in userland to accomplish the same thing.

I did originally. But it became obvious that (a) it's a common problem;
(b) being non-trivial, it would a require very wide set of test cases to
ensure it won't break in some random edge case; and (c) the functionality
already exists for POST.

Other languages (Ruby, for example) make REST very easy. Multipart support
for PUT was literally the only issue I personally encountered when writing
a public REST API in PHP.

Dave.

In short, in order to provide a proper REST service that supports
multipart
form data, we need someway to parse data sent via PUT (data is available
via php://input, but it needs to be parsed).

Multipart entity parsing is fairly straightforward. You could easily write
a parser in userland to accomplish the same thing. Unless you're doing a
very high volume of CRUD via PUT the performance hit of doing this in
userland should be negligible.

That said, I think exposing a function to do this could be a useful
addition, and since PHP already has code to parse these entities for POST
requests it shouldn't be too much work to expose that via something like a
new mime_multipart_parse() function. It's not really a priority for me, but
you can probably find someone to work on this for you if you're not a C
person.

The bigger issue here is that the superglobals are a leaky abstraction.
Any HTTP request method is allowed to have an entity body, so should we
also create $_PATCH and $_PUT and $_ZANZIBAR to handle less-frequently used
request methods? Where does it stop? This is the problem I see with all the
requests to support for PUT similarly to POST. PHP web SAPIs support 95% of
the HTTP use-cases people have, but the abstractions break down after that
and continuously bolting on support for individual scenarios beyond that
would be a mistake IMO.