As someone who is working in a software shop building an extensive set of SOAP based web services via Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) it's refreshing to have posts like this that make you feel like what your doing is right on the money....or not! :)  For internet facing web services I agree with Dare that REST is where it's at.  I'm not convinced that they're the answer for all problems....at least not yet.

For anyone unfamiliar with RESTful web services I recommend you pick up RESTful Web Services  by Sam Ruby and Leonard Richardson. About 6 months ago I started reading a draft copy of it and was very impressed.  It provides an excellent introduction to how to build RESTful web services and explains many of the core concepts that are necessary for fully grokking REST. 

On the train ride to and from work today I read RESTful Rails Development.  I've already done a fair bit of reading on REST and I've worked with several RESTful APIs lately (Amazon, Flickr), however, I found the RESTful Rails Development article a good introduction to what is at the heart of REST API's.  Namely, the idea of resources, and more specifically URI addressable resources.  The support for REST within Rails 1.2 adds a lot of nice features, and looks like a great way to support multiple output formats (html, xml, javascript, rss/atom, etc.) for applications that are oriented around resources.  Anyway, if your interested in REST or Rails, it's worth a read.

I'm sure you all know about RESTful web services by now, but what about RESTful databases?  Gary Bernhardt's "wildly ambitious database project" currently named RESTDB is "a database server and client implemented as a RESTful HTTP service in Python".