[cemerick]

Hi, author here. REST has its set of semantics, but (a) I don't think they're particularly useful for building computational services with, and (b) it's for all practical purposes predicated on HTTP, which carries a lot of baggage. Each _request_ is stateless (barring things like sessions^H^H^H^H^H hack workarounds), but clients and servers certainly are not; and, how one maintains that state and orchestrates further REST interactions based on an intermediate response is entirely on the implementer, _every single time_ a service or client is built/used.

I'd personally much prefer communication and computational primitives that can just as easily be used for a point-to-point interaction as they can be used to _build_ an ESB (enterprise service bus, I believe you mean?) if that's what I want.

I don't think nouns vs. verbs are a useful distinction. Turning operations into data is a first step, but all data is not equivalent. Some representations lend themselves to composition such that you can represent essentially arbitrary structures (sets, graphs, trees, multimaps, etc), but most (including the common ones of JSON and XML) do not. Likewise, some data representations allow for commutative operations so as to reconcile concurrent actors' activity, but most (again including JSON and XML) do not.