RESTful APIs have become a common way to expose services to the Internet since Roy Fielding first described them in his Ph.D. thesis (http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm). The basic idea is that a service exposes resources that can be accessed through a small set of operations. The only operations allowed are those named for and which behave like the HTTP verbs—DELETE, GET, HEAD, MERGE, POST, and PUT. Although this appears to be very simplistic, RESTful interfaces have proven to be very powerful in practice.
An immediate benefit of a RESTful interface is cross-platform support as regardless of platform an application capable of issuing HTTP requests can invoke RESTful operations. The Windows Azure Platform exposes almost all its functionality exclusively through a RESTful interface, so that it can be accessed from any platform.
In particular, the Windows Azure Storage Service REST API provides the definitive...