<p><pre><code>  but now we're discussing specific implementations, which is a separate issue.
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The author states that specific implementations is a separate issue, but it really isn't. You can't ignore that a good  implementation will mean that people will actually use your pet mechanism over someone else's. Most people don't want to reinvent the wheel, so they're not going to be writing the lib to handle the wire protocol, they're going to use a library that does what they need.<p>REST is heavy, and XML-RPC unnecessarily so. Facebook's Thrift (<a href="http://incubator.apache.org/thrift/" rel="nofollow">http://incubator.apache.org/thrift/</a> ) is a lightweight alternative to both.<p>(That said, REST in Python is fairly easy - <a href="http://developer.yahoo.com/python/python-rest.html" rel="nofollow">http://developer.yahoo.com/python/python-rest.html</a> )