So could I model all processes the ROA way? Undoubtedly yes. But, what’s the value of this over just doing a POST with the data I want to process and getting the result back? It’s much easier to implement that because I don’t need the build-up of the process resource to span multiple stateless requests. I don’t ask this rhetorically, I really want to understand why people think this approach to modeling processes is better.
If there’s nothing happening during that “process” that merits its own resource state, doing a POST and have it return the result seems perfectly fine to me. If it’s a longer-running process, or if it creates some state that merits having its own URI, modeling it as a set of resources makes more sense.
I find that when I think about Web as a space-based coordination platform like javaspaces, it just makes sense to model shared data structures as resources.