Does SOA Need MEST on Top of REST?

From the people who brought you Guerrilla SOA comes Message Exchange
State Transfer (MEST) to compete for service-oriented architecture
(SOA) developers' attention with Representation State Transfer (REST)
and good old SOAP. MEST is how Guerrilla SOA will get done, according
to Jim Webber, Ph.D., SOA practice lead for the ThoughtWorks Inc., the
leading proponent of the guerrilla approach. Meanwhile, Savas
Parastatidis, MSc., PhD. and technical computing architect at Microsoft,
has written a definition of MEST that also compares and contrasts it
with REST. Parastatidis sees REST as being primarily about resources
at the end of URLs where MEST would be the paradigm for the basic
message in a business applications, such as an invoice requiring an
action in a basic accounting system. "We would like to see MEST become
for service-orientation and Web Services what REST is for
resource-orientation and the Web," writes Parastatidis. In explaining
the basics of MEST, Parastatidis lists four key points: (1) MEST is
not an application protocol in the same way that REST is not one either;
(2) It is based on the transfer of a message and the processing of the
contents of that message in application-specific ways; (3) The behavior
of what happens with the contents of a message is defined through
protocols (description of complex message-exchange patterns); (4) MEST
attempts to describe service-oriented architectures in terms of
services and messages and a set of architectural principles. More Information