I thought I has this  RESTful web services thing figured out, but following one of the threads on the Yahoo group on Service-Oriented-Architecture I came to the conclusion that maybe I don't.

Steve Jones tried to see if he understands REST by giving an example and that example was corrected by Anne Thomas Manes (who is a research director with the Burton Group which recently stated that the future of SOA is REST).
Here are the examples from the above mentioned thread:

POST http://example.org/customer
HTTP message body contains a representation of "anne"
server creates a subordinate resource called http://example.org/customer/anne

GET http://example.org/customer/anne
returns a representation of "anne"

GET http://example.org/customer/personByName?name=anne
returns a representation of "anne"
or perhaps returns the URI of the "anne" resource
or perhaps returns a list of URIs of all people named "anne"
might also be specified more simply as
GET http://example.org/customer?name=anne

GET http://example.org/customer/personByAge?age=27
returns a list of URIs of people whose age is 27
or perhaps returns a collection of representations of all people aged 27
might also be specified more simply as
GET http://example.org/customer?age=27

PUT http://example.org/customer/anne
HTTP message body contains a representation of "anne"
either creates a new resource called "anne" (if none exists)
or replaces the existing "anne" resource

PUT http://example.org/company/newco
HTTP message body contains a representation of "newco"
either creates a new resource called "newco" (if none exists)
or replaces the existing "newco" resource

If you prefer the server to assign the URI you would instead say

POST http://example.org/company
HTTP message body contains a representation of "newco"
server creates a subordinate resource called http://example.org/company/newco

POST http://example.org/customer/anne?addCompany=http://example.org/company/newco
this would append the newco company reference to the "anne" resource

You can see another example for what I am talking about here on Jon Udell's blog giving an example from RESTful Web Services, by Leonard Richardson and Sam Rubycovering  of doing a transaction in RESTful style

If all these are indeed "legal" or "correct" RESTful interactions I have 2 observations to make
First, I guess Pat Helland is right when he said "Every noun can be verbed" since I don't see the real difference between having a contract with a PersonsByAge request which returns a document* of Persons and a REST request like " GET http://example.org/customer/personByAge?age=27" or even " GET http://example.org/customer?age=27".

The second observation has to do with the so called "uniform interface". I would argue that the resources and their attributes (age=27, name="anne") are the interface. the POST, GET etc. uniform interface does not mean much more than the "uniform" SEND, BROADCAST  interface of messaging.
Further more if resources and their attributes are indeed "the interface" - than not only does REST not have a uniform contract - it actually has a dynamic one which changes in run-time as new resources are created - such as the "POST http://example.org/company"  which creates a new resource "http://example.org/company/newco" in the example above

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* I think it is very important for SOA to have document oriented messages and not RPC one I\ll blog in a separate post about the differences. for now it is suffice to say that the REST hypermedia notion of returning the URIs of all the relevant persons should also be present (one way or another) in a good document oriented message even if you are using WS-* or plain messaging as transport