[oakenshield]

For HTTP clients and servers, I've not had too much trouble with cpp-netlib. It's heavily boost-based, and it uses Boost::Asio for concurrency and SSL handling, but if you're familiar with Boost, you can be up and running in no time. IIRC, this library is considered for official inclusion to Boost as well. I use cpp-netlib + RapidJSON for my REST API handling needs.

http://cpp-netlib.org/0.9.4/index.html

https://code.google.com/p/rapidjson/

I have no recommendations for writing REST services, however.

[alpatters]

Looking at the source, it looks like this lib uses boost:asio on non windows platforms.