Sadly (no, more than that, frustratingly, maddeningly, infuriatingly) we
cannot use a browser to test object_server.py because current browsers only
support the GET and POST methods. Change is coming, e.g. HTML5 forms will
support all four methods, but at the moment everyone is forced to work around
this painful browser limitation.
There are several common work arounds:
We could write our own client instead of using a browser. But this means more code to write, and then we'd have to distribute our client to our users, and people don't want another client, they have browsers and want to keep using them. Note however that this is a common solution in vertical applications, e.g. library access to commercial databases, and in commercial applications generally where we can provide a custom client to our customers, e.g. iTunes.
Modify our client to use Ajax to issue the calls. The browsers don't directly support PUT and DELETE, but they do all now support the XMLHttpRequest object. This enables programmers to use Javascript to issue PUT and DELETE requests and is my preferred solution in my own apps. I originally began these notes using this approach, but there was too much to explain about Javascript, and JSON or XML, and on and on.
Modify our server so we can tunnel through POST for UPDATE and DELETE. This is probably the most common strategy and suits us since we don't have to add another language (Javascript), but unfortunately we do have to ugly up our HTML a bit.