Sure, but that's a great example of what I'm getting at. All that complexity may let you do some pretty cool things. But it also comes at a cost, in terms of both development effort and implementation complexity, and I certainly wouldn't call it easy.

I fear, sometimes, that our collective tendency to prefer talking about the most interesting or most capable technologies tends to bias us toward over-engineering. Slinging JSON over HTTP is, in my personal opinion, a pretty hokey hack. But it's also the option that's the easiest to implement, the most widely understood, and, more often than not, it's more than up to the task.