What you say makes a certain kind of sense if you think of REST as a protocol. But REST is not a protocol. There seem to be quite a few people these days who t

What you say makes a certain kind of sense if you think of REST as a protocol. But REST is not a protocol. There seem to be quite a few people these days who think that REST means nothing more than "uniform interface" and/or "resources". But that's only part of the picture. http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arch_style.htm http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arch... "REST is defined by four interface constraints: identification of resources; manipulation of resources through representations; self-descriptive messages; and, hypermedia as the engine of application state." P.S. I'm not sure why you think batch operations are missing from REST. GET/PUT/POST/DELETE can apply just as well to collections as to individual resources.