The first workshop I attended covered REST (Respresentational State Transfer) or, and these are my words, using the relatively simple vocabulary of verbs provided by HTTP, e.g. POST and GET, to provide a simple protocol to make requests and return responses (data and links to actions, i.e. workflow) using URIs.  REST got a pretty negative press, or perhaps is was just about neutral, in that it doesn’t give any support for semantics.  My take is that decoupling semantics from REST (it’s all about syntax, particularly with RESTafarians promoting HTTP as the payload and not XML or anything that could support semantics) is good and that using URIs is simple but neat.  Particularly in the social “mashup” space where we don’t know what people will do with the data this, I felt, is a good thing.  Good presentation in the middle relating to loose coupling and architecture.  I’ll try to get hold of the slides.

One interesting note (perhaps) is that the next incarnation of HTTP comes with the PATCH method.