You may or may not be aware that there is debate going on about the „right“ way
to implement heterogeneous application-to-application communication: While the
current mainstream clearly focuses on web services based on SOAP, WSDL and the
WS-* specification universe, a small, but very vocal minority claims there’s a
better way: REST, short for REpresentational State Transfer. In this article, I
will try to provide a pragmatic introduction to REST and RESTful HTTP
application integration without digressing into this debate. I will go into
more detail while explaining those aspects that, in my experience, cause the
most discussion when someone is exposed to this approach for the first time.