RESTafarianism

I've read some things about REST in the past and I've never really seen much point to it. I mean, if it makes sense to use URLs to drill into data then do it that way. Otherwise don't. But now I see things a bit clearer. I can see how RESTful URLs are like SOAP responses that contain their own WSDL. I can see how the URL becomes a name for a piece or batch of data and that makes it easily cachable. That name for a batch of data also makes it more flexible. And you can make it scalable more easily because you can (for instance) put in place hierarchies of servers...load balancers for instance in a way that makes sense for your hierarchical data.

I still don't understand completely why it's called REpresentational State Transfer though.