[dale_glass]

A thing not being mentioned is caching.

Now I'm not a web dev, I've played around way back in the CGI era and since then moved on to other things. But my impression was that part of the point of REST was making it fit in a bit better in how the protocol is supposed to behave.

Early on there was a lot of stuff that did nothing but GET for everything. Done that way any layer in the middle can't make any sensible caching decisions, and even the logs are annoying to look at when you can't quickly tell apart what's retrieving data and what's changing it.

So my impression was that part of the point of REST is to shoehorn an API into something that makes sense in the way HTTP is supposed to work, and you're less likely to have something go dramatically go wrong because some cheap ISP is running a transparent proxy and deciding that the GET that's supposed to save something doesn't actually need to happen, because look, this user already made a GET to the same URL 5 seconds ago.

Now of course today everything uses SSL, but early on it wasn't that weird to run into some awful ISP that would do some sort of aggressive caching to save on upstream bandwidth, if not to actually try to recompress stuff in flight.