Article on REST from a SOA perspective

Short (3 page) article on REST (Representational State Transfer) from an SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) perspective. It describes some of the advantages of REST such as decoupling the data format from the interface contract and natural support of scalability. The article also provides a succinct description of SOA and REST.

The web services I have created have always been of the SOAP/WSDL type, but I have often thought about the place of REST services in future web development as we create more than just web sites and start creating web based data repositories.