Agree with your sentiment, but I've always seen PUT as idempotent, not POST. Typical rest usage has POST creating new objects, and return the object with a new

Agree with your sentiment, but I've always seen PUT as idempotent, not POST. Typical rest usage has POST creating new objects, and return the object with a new id. That's not idempotent. Doing it repeatedly makes new objects with new unique IDs. PUT is updating a given object, with the id in the URL. If you do it repeatedly, it's the same as a one time call. POST /user --> returns user with id PUT /user/12345 --> stores the data in the body for user with id 12345 PATCH /user/12345 --> merges the body with the existing object that has id 12345. (used to update specific field or fields)