I've just started reading an interesting book I bought a few months ago. It is titled "RESTful Web Services", comes from O'Reilly, and has been written by Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby. Its core idea seems to be web services must be kept simple to work and scale, and for this reason REST is way better than SOAP.

Two quotes. One is from the foreword of David H. Hansson:

A renaissance of HTTP appreciation is building and, under the banner of REST, shows a credible alternative to what the merchants of complexity are trying to ram down everyone's throats... [the book] shows you how to use those principles without the drama, the big words and the miles of indirection that have scared a generation of web developers into thinking that web services are so hard...

The second quote is from the book preface:

HTTP is uniquely well suited to distributed Internet applications because it has no features to speak of. HTTP weakness is its strength, its simplicity its power

I actually still haven't got to Chapter 1, but I think I'll like this book, and might as well get back to work on my own Delphi rest framework is this is inspiring.