I've had the same feeling and finally came to a few conclusion that Fielding's REST architectural constraints lead to client applications that are required to utilize undefined URIs for performance gains. The reason true RESTful APIs are scarce as compared to HTTP/JSON APIs is due to API developers recognizing this issue and choosing to deal with it by making URIs part of the API contract. The REST community has offered no additional guidance or answers other than to point out (correctly) that HTTP/JSON APIs aren't truly RESTful. That is OK.
I just finished reading the paper and that’s what it looks like to me. It’s a CRUD interface w/ multiple implementations (proxy, cache, route, serialize, filesystem store, memory store), which they create pipelines out of using some syntactic sugar in the Objective-Smalltalk language. This syntactic sugar, discussed in their paper on ‘polymorphic identifiers’, allows you to use the same syntax for writing content to a file as you would writing to a key in a map or a field in an object. If you look at the pictures / tables in this paper, you get a general idea of what they are doing (e.g. replacing the filesystem store with a memory store while running tests). These dynamically dispatched processing pipelines are powerful, but can be hard to follow (which is true of dynamically dispatched processing pipelines in general). The power/obfuscation is multiplied by the convenient syntax of the language.
My opinion is that the actual innovation is the ‘polymorphic identifiers’ they introduced in their previous paper, which is definitely worth a read as my one line description of it can’t really do it justice. It’s kind of like being able to overload the assignment operator. Once you have that kind of feature, it’s sort of a no-brainer to say ‘Hey, all I/O (variables in memory, filesystems, etc) should use the same interface’.
This is really neat. In this space, is the normal metric 'atmospheric CO2 equivalent'? Is this just so they can normalize the affects of all the different things that cause warming into one unit for discussion purposes?