Roy Fielding's Misappropriated REST Dissertation

Essay on how the ubiquitous REST pattern has been adopted and often misunderstood.

This is the deep, deep irony of REST’s ubiquity today. REST gets blindly used for all sorts of networked applications now, but Fielding originally offered REST as an illustration of how to derive a software architecture tailored to an individual application’s particular needs.

That original paper is probably one that all developers should read. There isn't any need to be a purist, but understanding the concepts more deeply will result in better solutions.