Interesting post by Keyur Shah:

A common way of designing a REST system is to recognize the resources and associate a logical hierarchy of URLs to them and perform the traditional CRUD operations by using the well-known HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT and DELETE).

Check out the discussion in the comments; I believe this is a very common misconception — if REST is CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) and I need more semantics than that, the right way surely must be to introduce new methods?

No, it’s not. This is probably the hardest thing to grasp about REST — the fact that any and all application semantics can be mapped to the uniform REST interface (the HTTP verbs) without introducing actions (operations/methods) into the URL, and without adding new verbs. I feel oddly compelled to write about this … but only after my (second) talk at JAX 2007, which is about this exact topic.