Either, niether or both stances could be correct REST depending on the meaning you want to give the operation. PUT replaces the entity or thing that has that u

Either, niether or both stances could be correct REST depending on the meaning you want to give the operation. PUT replaces the entity or thing that has that url. If the entity didn't previously exist then it is created. A cache should be able to use the incoming entity and return it directly for a following GET to the same url (in the same way the entity returned by a GET might be cached). I don't think anyone would configure a cache to work like this any more - but that's the idea. POST was the dynamic-web afterthought for anything that really didn't really fit into the website maintenance behaviour defined for GET, PUT or DELETE. You could send anything to an endpoint and it isn't cached. POST often gets used in REST to create an entity within a collection at the url, but really (in HTTP terms) anything goes. POST does allow for returning a cachable entity through use of a Location header. PATCH came much later and its use in REST is debated. Originally it was intended to effciently update multiple text documents through use of a single patch (or diff) document in the body. From a HTTP/caching point of view it is effectively the same as a POST (i.e. this is not an entity so don't cache it). People use PATCH today because they want to partially update a larger entity, but HTTP and REST did not provide for this. How the body of a PATCH is to be interprited in REST is effectively undefined - its up to you, just as with POST. Some prefer to do partial updates using PATCH for semantic reasons. Some like to use POST for syntactic ones. Some like to POST to a url extended to encode the part of the entity being changed (which is wierd but compatible with POST), and some wrongly do this with PUT. Unless you can see functional issues (e.g. when a CDN somewhere sees a DELETE for a url and could assume it should now always return a 404), then it's probably best not to get too hung up on which verb to use.