Since everyone is blogging about REST I was feeling left out, so here is my post.
Think about this as ordering a Domino’s Pizza.
You make a call and you get something in return. If you do it while lying down on the recliner, that is very RESTful.
If Howard Dean is screaming for a pizza, that isn’t very RESTful.
See how simple this all is? Ordering from a lazy-boy recliner, RESTful. Having Howard Dean order the pizza, not RESTful. All this talk about ATOM, COBRA, COM, HTTP, SOA, SOAP just confuses folks (if I wasn’t so hungry I probably would have used a Simpson’s example, but you’ll have to deal with this because I’m going to order a pizza right now).