I don't know whether I would go as far as to characterise REST as "just a research paper", mainly because it is so influential on the W3C TAG, but Roy Fielding echos the point Stefano makes when he notes that there are design tradeoffs with any distributed architecture - see
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2002Apr/0303.html Dr Mark H. Butler Research Scientist HP Labs Bristol [EMAIL PROTECTED] Internet: http://www-uk.hpl.hp.com/people/marbut/
