REST - Representational State Transfer

I'm no longer so sure about WSDL and all those acronyms anymore,
the big companies have really made them too huge and unworkable,
it's a standard that isn't really a standard, which is too bad,
it is such a great idea to have a way for different programming
languages to come together and have a way to transfer data between
them and be able to call procedures in other languages, anywhere
across the web. Hopefully someone simplifies it soon.

REST (Representational State Transfer) is an old idea that is
becoming new again, the idea of web servers transferring XML
and HTTP without the extra baggage of SOAP and WSDL. It was
really nice to think of this becoming standardized in some way,
but I think the important thing is that the data is human readable
and machine readable, and just plain XML is great for this. I've
been a part of some software projects where a binary data format
was used for economy, and in one of them it ended spectaularily
badly, it took 6 months to debug a very insidious problem and then
years later, the code was abandoned. The data *has* to be human
readable as well as machine parsable.

Here's some good REST links for you:

Wikipedia REST entry
A guy explains REST to his wife
Building WEB Servies the REST way
Roy Fieldings PhD thesis where he coins the term REST.