Hard RES(e)T – revisiting “obvious” things, from scratch

Some technologies become really common to nowadays Java geek’s tool belt – sometimes such “common”, that they just become welded into it and stop being paid any attention to. But suddenly there might be a need to revisit it and explain to somebody (maybe a teammate or what's worse, the client). That day it often turns out, that the most difficult things to explain, are the ones which appeared to be “obvious”. Probably not without a reason – as we’re dealing with something every day, we tend to progressively lose the point, or maybe we never even got that point properly (just not digging into evident topics). At the same time, we tend to underestimate the harm it may do - not only to our projects or products, but especially to ourselves. Things seem to be no different with REST – so taking it as an example let’s do a hard-reset to our dictionary and try to define and explain some obvious things from scratch. From plain web services to RESTfull APIs. Examination of conscience may follow – are we certain about all the other “terms” we meet every day? Have we ever made some thoughts on whether it actually makes any difference?