REST style architectures are interesting in their simplicity. This is the best explanation yet of the REST advantage:

Danny Ayers commenting on Joe Gregorio's entry about MegaData:

here's one way of approaching the problem:
Q. What's the distributed data system known to scale best?
A. The Web
Q. How does it represent data?
A. Links (binary relations) embedded in text blobs
Q. The Web is optimised for hypertext, how might the approach be generalised across domains?
A. Type the links, reduce the text

Simplicity is a great advantage to have.