[…] most folks who use the term are talking about REST without the hypertext constraint. In other words, not RESTful at all. REST without the hypertext constraint is like pipe-and-filter without the pipes: completely useless because it no longer induces any interesting properties. The RESTful Web Services book doesn’t help the situation by renaming the hypertext engine as connectedness. That does nothing but obscure its role as the driving force in RESTful applications.

Care to elaborate a bit for us mortal undergrads? I do understand that the “hypertext restriction” is another name for “hypertext as the engine of application state”, but how exactly ROA or “RESTful Web Services” fail at it?

Roy Fielding: I won’t take credit for that idea, but I stand behind it.  Perhaps I talk to different people than Roy does, but many of the people I do talk to don’t, um, connect when they hear the phrase   Yet, when I poi…