Hi,
Here are some links to readings that can be used as the basis for student presentations. If you decide to create a presentation around one of these readings please let me know. (Indeed, if you plan to present this coming Wednesday, definitely send me a message so I can get you on the agenda.
First, I would love a presentation on the chapters of Roy Fielding's dissertation that started the entire discussion on RESTful web services. In particular, chapter 5 and chapter 6.
Second, Tim Bray's weblog has a section that lists all of his posts that are related to Web Services. (Warning: Tim is very much anti-SOAP/Big Web Services.) There are several posts on that page that can be used to create a presentation for this class including:
We should balance Tim Bray with pro-SOAP/Big Web Services perspective. One person might be Don Box from Microsoft. Any student interested in looking for some pro-SOAP articles for us to consider. I have one pointer:
UnREST over WS-* and other "enterprisey" things
Finally, there are tutorial style links that might be interesting to explore, including:
WebMonkey's Getting Started with REST
XML.com's How to Create a REST protocol
10 Things to Change in your Thinking When building REST protocols
I'm sure there is a lot more articles out there that could lead to interesting discussions. If none of the above grab your attention, do a search and let us know what you find!