WS DevCon:Peter Drayton: Designing RESTful SOAP API
Peter gave a great intro to REST design pattern and the philosophy behind it. I?ve learned there?s lively debate going on between REST and SOAP ?camps?.

Rather than fueling the debate, Peter crystallized the benefits REST that can be directly used in SOAP world:
- Model your system as a set of resources. (This way you?ll be able to address them and work with them independently of the root SOAP interface)
- Assign logical URLs to resources. (Practically speaking, use URI strings as oppose to oblique Ids to refer to things)
- Define schemas for resource representations. (Now that a resource can be addressed via a URI, clients will also need access to WSDL)
- Enable discoverability of resources. (Allow traversal of SOAP ?content?)
- Provide appropriate resource manipulation operations. (Define a small set of operations clients can assume are supported)

After his talk, Peter, Tim and Sam talked about a need to get a WSDL from a SOAP URI. In order to enable discovery of resources, one would need to get a WSDL that corresponds to a URI referring to a SOAP resource. Everyone seemed to agree that this is one of the key missing links and will make "REST guys happy".