Rest is not an RPC protocol. If you need RPC you should use an RPC protocol. Rest is not universally applicable. The verbs don't map well to anything beyond sim

Rest is not an RPC protocol. If you need RPC you should use an RPC protocol. Rest is not universally applicable. The verbs don't map well to anything beyond simple CRUD operations. If you want to do something that isn't one of those operations it is going to be painful. You can get all the benefits of the plain text serializataion by using json or even xml as the payload serialization format with a much richer set of verbs. You can even use HTTP as the lower level protocol if you want and gain all the benefits that that gives you. Most of the pain people experience is when they try to use REST when they need an RPC protocol instead.