The WS-* vs REST battle has been waged, skirmish lines have blurred, scores settled, and while the dust clears developers are considering and building RESTful web services. However, along the way, the pendulum may have swung too far to the side of REST resulting in sometimes strict and even dogmatic interpretations of the core principles of the REST style. This has created noticeable gaps between what is being preached as theory and the demands of everyday implementation. If you are encountering this dissonance between theory and practice, and wondering about what to do about it, this session is for you.

Based on an upcoming "RESTful Web Services Cookbook", due to be published by O'Reilly and Yahoo! Press, this session will discuss a number of open areas and tries to come up with some pragmatic answers and strategies.

Among the topics covered are the more interesting use cases for POST, what to do about URIs that *do* change, a number of problems that HTTP caching does not solve, and the practical limitations of self-discovery.

Keywords: REST, HTTP, Web Services

Target audience: Architects and developers of RESTful applications