Indeed, a lot of the services touted as RESTful are less RESTful and more RPCish. REST has certainly become a fad term that's used to hype that anti-SOAP jugge

Indeed, a lot of the services touted as RESTful are less RESTful and more RPCish. REST has certainly become a fad term that's used to hype that anti-SOAP juggernaut and that's led to a lot of confusion since so many of the folks doing the yapping don't really understand REST. Your confusion (whether you've read Roy's dissertation or not) seems to be a fairly common one for people coming from an experienced RPC mindset. I had a similar conversation at SDWest after my talk on REST with a SOAPer -- he too was missing the point that terms like "document" and "resource" are much more abstract in REST than what the general English meaning implies -- particularly to people who's existing experience with RPC approaches like SOAP and CORBA before that gives them a very different and, arguably, much more concrete terminology for RPC.