REST, web speak, architectures

Why are new technologies on the web so slang infested? I found a reference to REST which I thought from earlier impressions was an architectural style for building web applications. Apparently, it is more complicated than that. Researching the matter is difficult, the usual ACRONYM gabble-gabble, future gobble-gobble.

So I looked it up on Wikipedia and found this little gem, out of the blue:

Systems that follow Fielding's REST principles are often referred to as RESTful; REST's most zealous advocates call themselves RESTafarian.

Rereading Wikipedia's summary the ideas in REST begin to make sense: build systems with URLs and send-command/return-contents protocols that are stateless and cacheable, instead of the usual remote procedure call/method invocation paradigm.

An interesting aspect of XML-RPC and SOAP is that you take a flexible format like XML that can easily support forwards and backwards compatibility and force a strict RPC interpretation down on top of it (if I understand things correctly, admittedly I'm no expert on web services). It may be easier than parsing the XML itself, but it is a poor man's version of a protocol. And why use XML when you're not really exploiting it anyway? Certainly not of performance reasons...

I have a feeling the requirement of a stateless protocol is a problem in many circumstances, though, having spent some time working on distributed file systems. Sometimes it's just better if the server can send a notification back to a client instead of the client having to poll. I believe NFS has left its much touted stateless approach with version 4.