Question

I’m well into implementing a REST service (on a Windows CE platform if that matters) and I started out using IBM’s general definitions of using POST for creating (INSERTs) and PUT for updating.

Now I’ve run across Sun’s definitions which are exactly the opposite. So my question is, which is the “generally accepted” definition? Or is there even one?

Answer 1

The disadvantage of using PUT to create resources is that the client has to provide the
unique ID that represents the object it is creating. While it usually possible for the client
to generate this unique ID, most application designers prefer that their servers (usually
through their databases) create this ID. In most cases we want
our server to control the generation of resource IDs. So what do we do? We can switch
to using POST instead of PUT.

So:
Put = UPDATE

Post = INSERT