Well yes, RPC systems are nothing but tooling and protocols so if those are the things that are different then everything changed ;) REST works because it's st

Well yes, RPC systems are nothing but tooling and protocols so if those are the things that are different then everything changed ;) REST works because it's stateless message passing (no object state), supports one-way connectivity (no dialback), the tooling was much better (no equivalent in RMI/CORBA/DCOM to a transparent cache or a load balancer), HTTP/1.1 is easy to understand and implement (or looks easy at least) so every language can have get on the stack very fast, it has auth systems that work, it's more layered/incremental because it leaves language and type system mappings to higher layers, and so on. Lots of valid reasons.