RFC 10008 standardizes the HTTP QUERY method, filling a long-standing gap between GET (safe, idempotent, cacheable but URI-length-limited) and POST (body-carrying but neither safe nor idempotent). QUERY carries a request body like POST but is defined as safe and idempotent like GET, with explicit cacheability keyed on both URI and body content. The RFC also introduces the Accept-Query header for capability discovery and the Location header for equivalent-resource linking. Ecosystem adoption is uneven: Apache Tomcat 12 merged support in July 2026, Jetty has an open PR targeting version 13, and Jakarta Servlet has an open issue. Spring MVC/WebFlux lacks a RequestMethod.QUERY and a fix is targeted for Spring Framework 7.1 in November 2026. Quarkus can implement QUERY today without framework changes by using Jakarta REST's @HttpMethod meta-annotation on top of its Netty/Vert.x HTTP layer, which treats the method as an arbitrary token. A demo project shows two media-type variants, proper 415/422 error codes, Accept-Query and Location response headers, ETag-based conditional requests, and OPTIONS-based discovery.
