Here’s the answer I gave to a question that came in on Ask The Experts, asking “What are the most important benefits a company can realize by following REST?”;
In general terms, ease of integration. Implementing RESTful services opens up your data to machines as easily as the HTML based Web does to humans, in effect turning your application integration problem into a data integration one. And almost as easily as you can integrate your data together (using data integration technologies like RDF or Topic Maps), you can also integrate other third party data sources together too.
The value of using http URIs to identify your business objects, and having them answer HTTP GET requests and responding with their state in document form is immense; it is the fundamental technique that enables this form of universally accessible data integration.
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