by Joshua Boverhof and Shreyas Cholia
RESTful HTTP web services have many advantages over the "big" web services paradigm of SOAP/WSDL/XML Schema. RESTful services are simpler to create, use, and test. REST/HTTP is native to the web, thus it's easy to digest these services from Javascript or a backend. NEWT is a RESTful web API to NERSC HPC resources, used by other scientific portals.