Explaining REST to Damien Katz
2008-08-17
This is an excellent summary of REST, why SOAP services should be considered broken and why your services should be RESTful. One overlooked benefit of REST: interacting with the HTTP ecosystem correctly. You might not be using a caching proxy on the server-side but if your clients want to use a caching proxy, making your service RESTful means it will behave correctly in unexpected, but legitimate, network architectures.
One fact I did not know: PUT is idempotent, POST is not.