Personally I prefer to think of HTTP as a transport mechanism, with business logic at a higher level. The question "If I replaced this http transport with, say, FTP or a dvd drop, would it require changes at the business logic level?" feels important to me.

That preference puts me on the wrong side of history at the moment though, and Im going with history. Lets express our business logic through the error system provided by our transport mechanism instead....

But a provided credit card number not existing is not success, it is unambiguously a failure.

HTTP is a transport but its response codes are clearly designed to map somehow to the "business logic" of the thing underneath it. We have to twist ourselves up in knots to map most of our business systems to the set of status codes that make sense for the default HTTP-fronted application (Fields' thesis stuff) but that's what we sign up for when we decide to expose our business services via HTTP. Other transports require different contortions.

But the failure is ambiguous. If I get a 404 back I can't rely on that to mean the credit card doesn't exist. It could mean that I have the wrong URL or that the service application screwed up their routing code.

And who's to say you can't put the reason in the body and still keep the code? What are you hurting by sending back 400? Unless you have lb's taking out nodes because of excessive 4xx's (which sounds like insanity) I don't see a reason _not_ to send 4xx's. At the very least it's a useful heuristic tool.

I had this discussion recently about 'security' with regard to X-Header versus ?query=param. Either it's http all plaintext on the network or it's http with tls all cyphertext on the network. Every bit in the http request and response is equivalent - verb, path, headers, body, etc - agree?

You could represent the card number as cyphertext in the request body, that's a good practice regardless of tls, but of course don't roll your own crypto. You could put that cyphertext in the path as well but if the cyphertext isn't stable that makes for a huge mess of paths.

You could make a case for trad 'combined' access logs situation with the path disclosed in log files. I can appreciate keeping uris 'clean' makes it safe to integrate a world of http monitoring tools, I would make this argument. In the case of the card represented in a stable cyphertext it's kinda cool to expose it safely to those tools.

Anything else?

Often systems will have application wide error handling to catch that and handle it in a systemic way. It can be a pain to short circuit that in a customizable off the shelf applications like Salesforce.

Philosophically, 4XX means the client did something wrong. Sending invalid data to a validation service is not doing something wrong.

The precise definition of 400 Bad Request is

    The 400 (Bad Request) status code indicates that the server cannot or
    will not process the request due to something that is perceived to be
    a client error (e.g., malformed request syntax, invalid request
    message framing, or deceptive request routing).

But if the service both validates the request and _then_ does something more substantial with it, I think 400 Bad Request is probably the most appropriate response to something that fails at step one.

The payoff of using 400 is you can watch your 400 rates with almost no effort (HTTP is well established and there's many many tools out there.) If you somehow start accidentally munging the card number sometimes or if your card processor starts doing wacky stuff you'll see a spike in 400 rates.

If it was really that troubling that declined cards are expected, I would personally at least want to see 200 come from the internal API and 400 go out to the client.

And if your "intermediate devices" start doing goofy stuff to 400's then you've got bigger problems... 4xx's shouldn't be taking nodes out of prod. That's wack.

Welcome to AWS, where this is actually part of standard procedure (at least Elastic Beanstalk does this, not sure if it’s actually Elastic Loadbalancer under the hood).

400 is "bad request"; you might use it if the request body was not valid JSON.

404 means "this API doesn't exist", not "the API exists but it returns an error"

    The 404 (Not Found) status code indicates that the origin
    server did not find a current representation for the target 
    resource or is not willing to disclose that one exists.

And let me say it's totally valid to just ignore that advice, and say that here, in this company, we use 200 OK for everything that isn't a parse failure. And that's not totally wrong! It won't break anything. You're not really leveraging any of the power of your transport but maybe that's fine for your situation.

It can get a little fuzzy for 401 and 403 errors, though; those seem to be returned by APIs pretty often. Not entirely sure how I feel about that, but I think those are a bit more sensible.

> The first digit of the Status-Code defines the class of response. The last two digits do not have any categorization role. There are 5 values for the first digit:

> - 4xx: Client Error - The request contains bad syntax or cannot be fulfilled

What do you think status codes like 404, 405, 406 are for? You say they shouldn't be for "did the application successfully validate the user's input data" but status code 400 is explicitly for bad requests. In your view should a HTTP server ever return 4xx?

Obviously if you send a TAIL method request, you should get a 405, and if you send Accept: eggs/*, you should get a 406. If a route doesn't exist, you should get a 404. If you fail HTTP basic auth, you should get a 403 (but why are you using HTTP basic auth?). If you want certain paths to never be accessed for some reason, you should return a 401.

Doesn't this depend on the nature of the REST API? (Though putting a credit card number on the path doesn't seem like a good practice.)