Stateless.. Nouns & Verbs.. Idempotent.. HTTP Auth.. Tokens.. We’ve all heard those phrases thrown around when we talk about REST. We’ve been told our systems have to include these characteristics or they’re not RESTful. We’ve talked over and over again on how to implement them. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, we lost the answer to “why?” What’s the point? What value do we gain by doing things the “right” way?