Indeed; true REST interactions tend to be quite coarse-grained; essentially requests to update a remote state machine to match the described state. Most of what gets called “REST” isn’t; it’s just ad-hoc RPC sent over HTTP with arguments encoded as XML/JSON, which is probably what parent really means. Take casual claims of RESTfulness with the requisite bucket of salt. (If the term “REST API” is used, you can toss the bucket entirely as the very phrase is itself an oxymoron.)