Not to be too snarky, but this is just another "I did REST poorly and it didn't work very well, so I guess REST sucks" post. Most of the other gripes have been

Not to be too snarky, but this is just another "I did REST poorly and it didn't work very well, so I guess REST sucks" post. Most of the other gripes have been responded to, but I wanted to add a comment about the "stateless" part: Its not that your Application is stateless, its the HTTP protocol itself that is. It is a contrast to other contemporary protocols like FTP or SMTP, in which you establish a connection and then perform "Commands", the order of which matters. In FTP, if you do: CONNECT ftp.example CD public GET myfile.jpg The `CD` command in Line 2 changes the behavior of the `GET` in Line 3. This different from HTTP in that each request is independent of any others. The "state" is that the FTP server has to "remember" the current working directory of each connected client. If there were need for a high-availability load-balanced FTP provider that could support tens or hundreds of thousands of simultaneous connections, it would be pretty difficult because you'd have to maintain that state across all the servers. On the other hand, the stateless nature of HTTP means we can have Proxies and Load Balancers and CDNs all over the planet, and it mostly just works.