REST stands for "Representational State Transfer", a name created by Roy Fielding of eBuilt in his PhD dissertation. Why is this interesting? Well, in the context of web services, REST seems to be the architectural style for future web services, according to Paul Prescod. And while the W3C's Technical Architecture Group (TAG) argues about the safety of various flavors of HTTP programming, two icons of the Web have gone different directions: Google toward SOAP, and Amazon (whether they know it or not) toward REST {xmlhack newsitem}