Okay, this one is probably going to sting a bit. But here it goes. Don Box, my hero of adventures long gone, has coined (or as much as that) a new term: Lo-rest. He provides a list of bullet points to define it, and even comes out as the first member of the newly minted congregation. Almost immediately the poision-pill meme catches on, appearing on smart people’s blogs and mailing lists.
Well, fellas, somebody ought to come out and say it: there’s no REST in Lo-REST. It’s barely good HTTP. It seems, after years of trying to bend HTTP into a donut with the WS-* spec and somesuch, Don wants to get back to basics and normalcy of what HTTP was intended to be. And I applaud that. But please, pretty please, don’t call it REST. Or Lo-REST. Or Hi-REST.
For as long as you use “invoke”, and “service-oriented” in your jargon, you are not applying REST architectural style. If anything, it’s REV. Please, Don, you’re well-known and well-respected and your words are picked up and carried by crowds like you’re some sort of religious cleric. RTFM?