Hi everyone,
we have one small product announcement: from the 1st of August, 2018 our
geocoding API will begin returning an error for requests that are not made
with HTTP GET method. Specifically, non-GET requests will receive the
HTTP status code 405 - Method not allowed as response.
I write that this is a small announcement because none of our API wrappers (neither those we wrote and support ourselves, nor any of the open-source community supported libraries) support anything other than GET requests, and our logs show that only a handful of users have made POST requests to our API in the last few months. This change will have no impact for the overwhelming majority of our existing API users, and no paying customers. We are individually contacting each of the few users who will be affected and informing them of the need to change how they call our API. Nevertheless, for completeness we are announcing the change here as well and giving one month of notice.
Why are we making this change?
Given that very few such requests are being sent, you might ask why we are making this change. One of the key API design philosophies we aim to follow is respecting developer time. Our service should be as simple for developers to understand and use as possible. When the developer has made a mistake it should immediately obvious - both that there was a mistake and what that mistake was.
GET is the correct method to use when retrieving data. While we have to date
unofficially supported POST requests, that method is not intended to be
used for retrieving information, and this is not a good practice, so it makes
sense to clarify things
happy geocoding,