PUT vs POST in REST

With POST you're creating a resource within the resource identified by the Request-URI. The server is responsible for creating a URI for the new resource you created.<p><pre><code> POST /forum/http/ - creates a new post into the HTTP forum POST /photogalleries/cats/ - uploads a new photo into the cats photo gallery </code></pre> With PUT the client knows the resource's URI. The client uses it to create or update the resource. The easiest why to visualize this is to think of a filesystem<p><pre><code> PUT /forum/http/post-vs-put - upserts a post identified by "post-vs-put" into the HTTP forum PUT /photogalleries/cats/smelly-cat - upserts a photo identified by "smelly-cat" into the cat's photo gallery.</code></pre>

I've often thought of creating a "Cult of HTTP" that goes door to door and hands out pamphlet versions of Chapter 8 of "RESTful Web Services" to web developers.<p><a href="http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/web-development/web-services/9780596529260/rest-and-roa-best-practices/bestpractices#X2ludGVybmFsX0ZsYXNoUmVhZGVyP3htbGlkPTk3ODA1OTY1MjkyNjAvMjE1" rel="nofollow">http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/web-development/web-ser...</a>

This was a nice take-away for me: "PUT is idempotent".

I think either way is okay. It depends on how you want to structure it. Most web APIs aren't entirely RESTful anyway. It is also important to note that a lot of hosting providers don't support other verbs than GET or POST (ie Low-REST) [1].<p>[1] <a href="http://www2008.org/papers/pdf/p805-pautassoA.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www2008.org/papers/pdf/p805-pautassoA.pdf</a>

1. What do you do if you wish to hide a query from the HTTP access log? Normally I would use POST rather than GET, but if I wish to make my API restful I have to ensure that POST is for create, and GET is for read.<p>2. Does PUT data also not appear in the HTTP access log?<p>3. What do you gain from doing everything this way? There are a lot of developers that won't have any idea what all of these HTTP request codes and methods actually are.

And once you've agreed on PUT vs POST, you can start the arguments on PUT vs PATCH !<p><a href="https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/348" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/348</a>

I would love to match curd with rest and I dnt find any ptoblems after that.<p>Create - Put, Update - Post, Retrieve - Get, Delete - Delete

Old questions in SO, generate interest in HN? Isn't N supposed to be NEWS?