Resting?

I've just become aware of a new term: REST. It stands for Representational State Transfer. It's kinda like a 'back to basics' movement about web standards and how the internet is developing. As time goes on, protocols have been layered on top of protocols. In the begining was IP, then HTTP got layered on top, subsequently SOAP was layered on top of HTTP and now we have a whole load of WS-* protocols being layered on top of SOAP. The REST people are basically saying that a lot of the new protocols are duplicating stuff that the older lower level protocols do already. Why have a SOAP action when HTTP already gives you CRUD verbs; GET, POST, PUT, DELETE? Why do we need to have identifiers when we already have the URL? A RESTafarian (I didn't make that up) would say you can do web services without SOAP or any of that WS-* stuff. Say I want to get a customer. All I'd need to do is carry out an HTTP GET for this URL: http://www.thecompany.com/enterprise/customer/0123456 That would return me a POX (Plain Old Xml, didn't make that up either) representation of my customer. RESTafarians would also argue that my customer resource should only have stuff about the customer itself, related resources (orders, invoices) should be represented by links to those resources. If it all seems slightly familiar, it is, of course, just how the simple HTML web works and the simplicity of the model is the World Wide web's fundamental strength. It's a persuasive argument and a real challenge to the current dominance (at least in the Microsoft world that I live in) of SOAP RPC style web services. Now, can REST be done with WCF, that's a question!