We may need to provide a RESTful web service interface to our application.
THe RESTFul architecture provides some guiding principles for some parts of the interface but leaves others entirely open - in particular, it doesn't seem to say anything about the format of the data transferred in a request or response.
While this is very open and flexible for implementers, we do need to make a choice!
So this question is to ask if there are any emerging standards for the way RESTful web services are implemented - e..g JSON or XML for the payload? Specified by XML schemas or something else?
If no emerging standards, are there guidelines and best practices for how to make these kinds of choices?
In our case, we're pretty free to choose what works best for our application - we are not (yet) constrained by what the systems that will be invoking these web services can handle.