Idempotent methods
Have you ever noticed a method in your project or programs which act and respond the same way whether you call it once or n number of times irrespective of the situation or variation in inputs? Meet the idempotent methods. Idempotent methods are not different from any other methods in terms of how they look and feel or syntactically constructed. But how idempotent is different from any other method is in the way it behaves during the run time. Idempotent methods are monotonous methods in essence even if you call them any number of times it still responds back as if it was called once. Probably you are unaware that the HTTP GET, PUT, DELETE and HEAD methods are idempotent methods. For example the GET method of a particular page request would always bring back the same content how many ever times you call it under any different situation. Hence web server implementations assume this and cache the GET requests. That is yet another reason that you should use the POST method for the web requests. You can read more about it with a good example here in Wikipedia. Ironically idempotent methods are free of side effects. Idempotence is also a mathematical concept. Again more about this, here in Wikipedia.
