InfoQ publishes a chapter from “RESTful Web Services” by Richardson and Ruby; in an accompanying interview, the authors explain their motivations and REST as an alternative to SOAP/WSDL Web services.

Doing this interview was a lot of fun — my favorite quote comes from Sam (emphasis mine):

The thing that changed my mind was a code base called Blosxom initially by Rael Dornfest. […] That, and the observation that the number of publicly available SOAP stacks continues to exceed the number of publicly deployed SOAP web services.

Leonard and Sam very, very clearly know what they are talking about. I have little doubt that this book is going to be the work on REST for the foreseeable future.