Rethinking Web Services from First Principles

REpresentational State Transfer (REST) guided the creation and expansion of the modern web. What began as an internet-scale distributed hypermedia system is now a vast sea of shared and interdependent services. However, proposed Web Services protocols abandon REST altogether in favor of SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) exchanges codified in XML that hijack HTTP (HyperText Transport Protocol) as transport. Another path is possible. Our investigation yields a set of extensions to REST, an architectural style called Computational REST (CREST), that embraces service exchanges as the fundamental element of web interaction, obviating Web Services as a separate, incompatible layer atop a web whose underlying architectural model is REST.