It's important to understand that REST is not a protocol. It is an architecture style that can be used to design systems. It brings in a noun-oriented approach to access resources (instead of a verbs).
The Apache CFX framework has new features (using the magic of annotations) that make it possible to have true REST style webservices.
More information on this can be found here and here.
Recently came across this article that states the REST principles that should be followed during design:
1. Give every resource an ID. Use URIs to identify everything that merits being identifiable, specifically, all of the "high-level" resources that your application provides, whether they represent individual items, collections of items, virtual and physical objects, or computation results. Examples:
http://example.com/customers/1234
http://example.com/orders/2007/10/776654
http://example.com/products/4554
2. Link things together. (Hypermedia as the engine of application state)
Example: Element in XML doc: product ref='http://example.com/products/4554'
We could use a simple 'id' attribute adhering to some application-specific naming scheme, too but only within the application’s context. The beauty of the link approach using URIs is that the links can point to resources that are provided by a different application, a different server, or even a different company on another continent because the naming scheme is a global standard, all of the resources that make up the Web can be linked to each other.
3. Use standard methods. For clients to be able to interact with your resources, they should implement the default application protocol (HTTP) correctly, i.e. make use of the standard methods GET, PUT, POST, DELETE
e.g. GET - get order details/list all orders
PUT - update order
POST - add order
DELETE - delete order
4. Communicate statelessly - This is for scalability.
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