In this new post to Reddit.com, the question is asked "Should I be doing just about everything using REST?" - wondering if their new applications should all sit on top of a web service for their functionality.

I'm pretty new to server-side programming, and actually started out with Python/mod-wsgi. From the ground up, mod-wsgi made a lot of sense. The server gets a request, you route the request. It feels like that's where I should start, so that's pretty much what I'm trying to create with PHP (a REST router - for learning purposes, I know frameworks exist). I'm trying to think of a situation where I wouldn't use a REST interface, but I can't seem to think of one (even for simple cases). Would it be safe to say that using REST is a pretty safe bet, most of the time?

There's some good discussion and answers to his question touching on things like Service Oriented Architectures, some implications of having a web service power an entire application (or applications) and a few comments with some personal experience.

A comment about SOA sums it up well:

You learn to write for your platform in the way developers/partners will have to, so you produce a good quality usable API which encourages development and consumption of your platform.