One of my clients asked me to write a very simple RESTful web service to retrieve user data (name, email, address, etc.) based on login credentials.  Having recently finished working on a PHP-driven RESTful interface for another client (based on the Zend Framework), I thought this would be a simple and straightforward task.  As comedian Bill Engvall says: "Here's your sign!".  I should have known better. Would you like to know more?