Is REST DELETE really idempotent?

Question

DELETE is supposed to be idempotent.

If I DELETE http://example.com/account/123 it\'s going to delete the account.

If I do it again would I expect a 404, sin

Answer 1

Suppose we have to manage football teams represented by id, name, city.

{
    id: "1",
    name: "manchester united",
    city : "manchester "
}

Saying that Delete is idempotent means that if you invoque DELETE /team/1 several time the state of the system stay unchanged (in fact the first call DELETE /team/1 delete the team. In other words, delete is idempotent because duplicated call let the state of system unchanged.

In the same way we can say PUT also is idempotent. imagine you do this PUT more than once :

PUT /team/1
{
        id: "1",
        name: "liverpool",
        city : "liverpool"
}

Duplicated calls of such PUT request always have the same effect (the team 1 will be liverpool).

It is obvious that GET requests are idempotent also.