Right now, REST along with JSON are the predominant players in the opensource Web Services stack. To that end, RESTful Web Services is a good book to start with. That being said, as friedo pointed out, REST is not the be all, end all of Web Services.

Here are some of the pro's of of using REST/JSON:

• integrates well with AJAX
• JSON more perlish than XML
• CRUD maps nicely into the HTTP verbs

And here are some of the cons:

• badly designed services can put a huge load on your server (AJAX gone wild).
• Error handling hard to map well into HTTP response codes
• PUT and DELETE not supported by all servers
• POST/PUT tends to be in flux as to which is a CREATE and which is UPDATE (for me, POST is an UPDATE and PUT is a CREATE, but apparently I'm in the minority).

That all being said, REST/JSON/AJAX has been a refreshing approach to building webapps for me.

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