[heyrhett]

He's right, but older web developers might remember the alternative, which was having no design pattern at all.

Most web developers aren't going to read the computer science papers about REST, and how strictly you want to adhere to it, depends on you, and your development team. It's a design pattern, or a tool, but it's not a religion.

On that note, I've gone into several job interviews where they ask me to explain what REST is, and I always start with, "REST stands for Representational State Transfer...", at which point, I get the feeling that the interviewer wasn't aware of that, and I wind up telling them way more about REST than I think they wanted to know.