Regarding Paul Prescod's article: A couple good discussions started on the Joel On Software discussion forums, this one and Paul Prescod's response. Justin Rudd provided some good insights. I also see that 0xdecafbad has some thoughts on REST vs. SOAP. I also agree with Ingo Rammer that the remoting issue may be a red herring. And Peter Drayton's demo at DevCon showed that such things seem to be possible. I need to digest all this. Part of the problem is that I just don't feel like I understand REST. Someone on Joel's discussion forums said "REST, I'm afraid, is unlikley to get anywhere until it is presented in a more utilitarian fashion. It feels much too much like a philosophy or religion or something.", and I agree with this. SOAP is succeding because implementors like myself have decent toolkits to work with; I don't know of any REST toolkits. Maybe the idea is too simple and I'm making it harder than it needs to be. Is what Paul's proposing simply to keep on writing CGI style applications, but to return structured data (key value pairs, XML, whatever) instead? I moved away from that world because of the simple lack of strong interface definitions. It's simply to easy to not be rigorous about the interface and that makes programming against that interface a nightmare, both for the server and client. But Paul says he's advocating WSDL; I admittedly missed this and need to reread his article. In any case, it seems to me that it's as easy to write a lousy SOAP interface as it is to write a lousy GET/POST interface.