What is the difference between GET vs POST vs PUT? Mainly POST vs PUT?

shivajikobardan

First of all I am not learning this currently from web development Point of view. So I think I don’t need the extreme level of understanding. I am studying this in a topic called “HTTP protocol”. And in my opinion, I need to learn enough to write what it does in exam paper.

It is so confusing in internet. I can’t explain enough. Firstly I was just confused between PUT and POST. But later someone started to tell me that you could use GET instead of these two in submitting form. That got me confused to next level.

What I have already understood(be it wrong or right I am not sure).

GET-: It helps to retrieve the file indicated by URL in request line from server.

PUT and POST seems same thing to me.

PUT places data in body to the URL in request line.

POST has no such definitions anywhere in books or internet. And it is generalized as “POST is used to submit form data”.

But the gist of these two seems similar ie post data to server. What’s the difference?

And there are like 6,670,000,000 results  in google. 

But I don’t know how stupid I am to not get this.Most articles in internet are copied from each other and written pretty unprofessionally. I am not very smart. I mean smart in the sense that one who can understand anything taught by anyone and doesn’t need that clarity. I need something very simplified to understand and I don’t find it at least till now.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/630453/what-is-the-difference-between-post-and-put-in-http

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/107390/whats-the-difference-between-a-post-and-a-put-http-request

These are perhaps the only reputable answers about this but I find them very confusing.

They say idemptotencyy is there in some and not in other. But I want their basic difference in working.(PUT is idempotent).

Idempotent means you can keep repeating the same thing again and again but the final result will be the same as the initial result that happened when you did that thing for the first time.

Is this the only difference between POST and PUT working and is their definition same? 

Another thing that I am seeing is PUT keeps data to be sent in URL whereas POST doesn’t do it. How do we know about it? I can’t see any information that shows this thing practically. (They say while googling you use PUT so that you can visit that page again as well.) But IDK how to explain, I don’t know how. 

Just tell me the difference between PUT and POST in terms of real working difference, Like how they work. Thanks for the information.

trojin

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7231

shivajikobardan

thanks for information. if you've already studied about that rfc(i am not at the level of reading rfc, and reading rfc for writing 1 marks worth of answer seems overkill).can you share the gist?
i am seeing PUT for update and POST for CREATE of CRUD

FluffyBunny

As far as I understand it, you can understand them to be something like:

• POST = make something new
• PUT = update something existing, or make something new

The PUT method requests that the state of the target resource be
   created or replaced with the state defined by the representation
   enclosed in the request message payload.

For example, POST is used for the following
   functions (among others):

   o  Providing a block of data, such as the fields entered into an HTML
      form, to a data-handling process;

   o  Posting a message to a bulletin board, newsgroup, mailing list,
      blog, or similar group of articles;

   o  Creating a new resource that has yet to be identified by the
      origin server; and

   o  Appending data to a resource's existing representation(s).