I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the Richardson Maturity Model: http://martinfowler.com/articles/richardsonMaturityModel.html http://martinfowler.com/article

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the Richardson Maturity Model: http://martinfowler.com/articles/richardsonMaturityModel.html http://martinfowler.com/articles/richardsonMaturityModel.htm.... It's explicitly for discussing and characterising the degree of RESTfulness of a given API. For my money there's nothing actually wrong with implementing, say, a level 1 API, as long as you don't claim anything higher. It'd be very nice for everyone to be at level 3, but obviously the tooling isn't there yet to support it universally.