The HTTP request/response itself should be atomic One of the great advantages of REST is that makes data caching easy. Statelessness is a requirement for cachi

The HTTP request/response itself should be atomic One of the great advantages of REST is that makes data caching easy. Statelessness is a requirement for caching. "Would it not be possible to represent a query or transaction as a resource" Anything's possible just about but the whole point of REST is to create uniform resource locators for data. The problem with creating rather forced complicated URIs is that you quickly lose uniqueness: the same data will start being represented by more than one URI and therefore will start to be cached a multiple of times leading to conflicts.