Novelty of REST and GIS

Christopher Schmidt is exactly right:

(Note that I did this before I even saw posts about it -- I think this is just more evidence that all the things we're talking about here are well understood and not novel, though it is interesting that we're all implementing them at the same time.)

Being the first geospatial project to jump on an already filling bandwagon, 6-7 years after the publication of RFC 2616, is really no big deal. The interesting question is why it took us (the industry and community) so long. Personally, I didn't get what REST was about until I started reading about atompub and Rails.