I’ve been working with the Web throughout my entire software engineering career. I started out writing ASP pages and COM components. I then moved into the world of .NET with ASP.NET and ASMX web services.

In 2004, I got involved with BizTalk Server, which pushed me even more into the world of services and XML. I worked with Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) in its early beta stages, before its release in 2007. At that time, the Microsoft world of services was focused on service-oriented architecture (SOA), SOAP, and the WS-* specifications as the preferred methods for building services.

Had I been paying attention, I would have noticed that in 2000 a man named Roy Fielding had written a doctoral dissertation describing the architecture of the Web. By 2000, the Web had arguably become the world’s biggest and most scalable distributed application platform. In his dissertation, Fielding examined this platform and distilled from it an architectural style based on the factors that led to its success. He named this architecture REST and suggested it as a way of building not only websites, but also web services.

REST is an architecture that uses the strengths of the Web to build services. It proposes a set of constraints that simplifies development and encourages more scalable designs.

Developers (the majority of whom were outside the Microsoft world) began to adopt this set of architectural constraints shortly after it was proposed (although, to be fair, there were a few inside the Microsoft camp who jumped on the REST technology). Many toolkits embraced REST as the major driver for building applications and services, especially Ruby on Rails, which soared in popularity.

Although WCF isn’t tied to SOAP and WS-*, the majority of its programming model was initially geared toward building those kinds of services. The WCF channel model actually did have support for building services using REST, but the WCF programming model lacked explicit support for doing so.

In 2007, a Microsoft program manager named Steve Maine spearheaded an effort to build a REST programming model on top of the WCF infrastructure. This model was released with WCF 3.5 in early 2008.