REST with JSON has become the de facto standard in cross-application communication technologies for web-based applications.
It's a very effective protocol, and the fact that the definition can be understood by everyone made it popular pretty quickly.
Also, a rapid REST implementation can be rolled out pretty quickly compared to other more complex communication protocols.
As the Python standard library provides the foundations we needed to build WSGI-based applications, it's not hard to extend our existing recipe to support REST-based dispatch of requests.