Assorted Threads

Why PUT and DELETE?

• Bill Venners: In your blog post entitled "Why REST Failed," you said that we need all four HTTP verbs—GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE— and lamented that browser vendors only GET and POST." Why do we need all four verbs? Why aren't GET and POST enough?
• Elliotte Rusty Harold: There are four basic methods in HTTP: GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE. GET is used most of the time. It is used for anything that's safe, that doesn't cause any side effects. GET is able to be bookmarked, cached, linked to, passed through a proxy server. It is a very powerful operation, a very useful operation.
• POST by contrast is perhaps the most powerful operation. It can do anything. There are no limits as to what can happen, and as a result, you have to be very careful with it. You don't bookmark it. You don't cache it. You don't pre-fetch it. You don't do anything with a POST without asking the user. Do you want to do this? If the user presses the button, you can POST some content. But you're not going to look at all the buttons on a page, and start randomly pressing them. By contrast browsers might look at all the links on the page and pre-fetch them, or pre-fetch the ones they think are most likely to be followed next. And in fact some browsers and Firefox extensions and various other tools have tried to do that at one point or another.
• PUT and DELETE are in the middle between GET and POST. The difference between PUT or DELETE and POST is that PUT and DELETE are idempotent, whereas POST is not. PUT and DELETE can be repeated if necessary. Let's say you're trying to upload a new page to a site. Say you want to create a new page at http: //www.example.com/foo.html, so you type your content and you PUT it at that URL. The server creates that page at that URL that you supply. Now, let's suppose for some reason your network connection goes down. You aren't sure, did the request get through or not? Maybe the network is slow. Maybe there was a proxy server problem. So it's perfectly OK to try it again, or again—as many times as you like. Because PUTTING the same document to the same URL ten times won't be any different than putting it once. The same is true for DELETE. You can DELETE something ten times, and that's the same as deleting it once.
• By contrast, POST, may cause something different to happen each time. Imagine you are checking out of an online store by pressing the buy button. If you send that POST request again, you could end up buying everything in your cart a second time. If you send it again, you've bought it a third time. That's why browsers have to be very careful about repeating POST operations without explicit user consent, because POST may cause two things to happen if you do it twice, three things if you do it three times. With PUT and DELETE, there's a big difference between zero requests and one, but there's no difference between one request and ten.
• (from http: //www.artima.com/lejava/articles/why_put_and_delete.html)