Web Things, by Mark Baker

Not that I agree with everything James has to say about SOA, but he makes a good point about a couple of techniques/constraints commonly used in large scale systems;

Statelessness and idempotence are techniques that have been around for years (both appear, for example, in the design of NFS from 20 years ago) are usually considered key components of SOA architectures.

He’s absolutely right. Note how REST requires the former, and HTTP provides the latter. This is in contrast to Web services where idempotence isn’t core, and statelessness is explicitly eschewed (by more than one spec).

Very telling, I suggest.