Web Things, by Mark Baker

Hugh Winkler shares some thoughts on what is and isn’t RESTful in a recent rest-discuss thread;

RESTful design is not an end in itself: If you find yourself adding complexity to honor the constraints of REST, consider the benefit of the complexity and only do it if the benefit is clear.

Without a doubt. The reasons I dwell on the minutae of what is and isn’t RESTful is pretty simple though. It’s not because I’m some kind of architecture astronaut as many assume. No, I’m interested in the edge cases of RESTfulness because I want to understand exactly when I’m making a tradeoff, as well as what kind(s) … which is far more difficult than you’d expect.