RestfulArchitecture

Among many other cool things, Roy Fielding was the primary architect of HTTP1.1 and a co-founder of the Apache HTTP Server. In his 2000 DoctoralDissertation he described the REST (Respresentational State Transfer) architecture style.

In short, HTTP was designed so the commands GET and POST are sufficient for communication between systems or humans and systems. Any "resource" should be addressable by a URI. A GET command retrieves the resource. A POST on the same URL requests an update or initialization of the resource. (PUT, HEAD and DELETE imply less common operations.)

REST greatly simplifies the world, eliminating the need for SOAP envelopes or RPC protocols. It's really not open for debate that this is a great architecture for large scale systems. Most of the Internet runs on REST and is perhaps the best example of interoperability ever built.

The REST Wiki has great links and discussions, like REST vs SOAP and REST vs Wiki.

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