[snapetom]

I agree. Fielding's dissertation was exactly that - an academic dissertation. A lot of what it proposed wasn't even possible given the languages, software, and protocols. What's important now is that there are REST-ful qualities that people understand and agree upon and even more importantly, future specifications like GraphQL are more rigid and more practical. The industry has learned its lesson.

The author mentions SOAP as what REST came out of, but there were really at least two camps - the formal SOAP camp and Wild West of doing it however you want with POST calls. People were frustrated at these extremes. Regardless of the intention, Fielding's dissertation came at the right time and showed us a path that was simpler than SOAP, but more formal than the Wild West method.