Over the past years, several discussions between advocates of the two major architectural styles for designing and implementing Web services (the RPC/ESB-oriented approach and the resource-oriented approach) have been mainly held outside of the traditional research and academic community. Mailing lists, forums and developer communities have seen long and fascinating debates around the assumptions, strengths, and weaknesses of these two approaches. The RESTful approach to Web services has also received a significant amount of attention from industry as indicated by the numerous technical books being published on the topic.

This fourth edition of WS-REST, co-located with the WWW2013 conference, aims at providing an academic forum for discussing current emerging research topics centered around the application of REST, as well as advanced application scenarios for building large scale distributed systems.

In addition to presentations on novel applications of RESTful Web services technologies, the workshop program will also include discussions on the limits of the applicability of the REST architectural style, as well as recent advances in research that aim at tackling new problems that may require to extend the basic REST architectural style.

• WS-REST2013: WS-REST 2013: Fourth International Workshop on RESTful Design (#WS-REST2013)