REST API

I was going through some XML-RPC & SOAP WebServices stuff for PHP and saw yet another Web-based RPC standard called as REST (Representational State Transfer), which is pretty much simpler and with lower invocation overhead than the other two.. atleast for simpler services where the complexities of the SOAP is not needed. The REST model fits very well in basic web flow and is more represntational (hence the name REST) than the other two counterparts.

A few links that I found to be useful, and a few API's which are in its initial stages are as follows,
- http://www.ics.uci.edu/~taylor/documents/2002-REST-TOIT.pdf
- http://upcoming.org/services/api/

Although the REST concept started way back in 1994, it never got into mass market. That is interesting as well as surprising, as to how big companies can kill the simpler concepts for complex enterprise applications, which may not be indeed needed in most of the web applications.