Ethan Cerami: "A major element of web services is planning for when things go wrong, and propagating error messages back to client applications. However, unlike SOAP, REST-based web services do not have a well-defined convention for returning error messages. In fact, after surveying a number of REST-based web services in the wild, there appear to be four different alternatives for handling errors. Below, I outline the four alternatives, and then provide my opinion on which option or combination of options is best."