Are you? Hey, there is nothing wrong with being one and enjoying life… REST is very simple to use, more and more services on the web are getting exposed using REST, and recently the Restlet API was introduced.

For those new to REST, Representational State Transfer or REST, is the result of Roy Thomas Fielding PhD Dissertation, an HTTP-based model for the programmatic consumption of web content and services, that uses URIs for representing “items” on the web, and the HTTP methods GET, PUT, POST and DELETE to operate on them. Returned data is typically in XML.

Examples of Web 2.0 REST-based APIs include: Yahoo!, which has been exposing most of its services using REST, for example see Creating a REST Request for Yahoo! Search Web Services, and the Flicker's REST API.

While the latest Google APIs are not really REST-based, there is XooMLe, which allows you to query the Google search engine and have your results returned in XML. I am not really sure about Google's APIs strategy, and if their APIs will get exposed using REST.

Bottom line is that REST-based services are simple to consume, and simplicity is always a winner.

Update: Interview of Jerome Louvel, Restlet project founder.