REST (REpresentational State Transfer) distills the Web's architecture into a general framework. The Web succeeded by defining a small but expressive set of methods -- GET, POST, etc -- that can act on an unlimited set of resources, represented as URLs. The resulting system is stateless, loosely coupled, and scales better than RPC implementations such as DCOM, CORBA, and RMI. What does REST mean for Web Services? Does REST describe a way for building intra- and inter-application communication that is as flexible as the Web itself, while avoiding the brittleness and coordination costs of RPC?