Designing Evolvable Web APIs with ASP.NET

Foreword

Henrick Frystyk Nielsen

When Tim Berners-Lee first proposed the Web in March 1989 at CERN, he set in motion a social revolution of creativity and opportunity that has since swept the world, changing how our society works, how we interact, and how we perceive our role as individuals within our society.

But he also set in motion an equally impressive technological revolution in how engineers think about and build software and hardware systems for the Web. The notion of a web server has changed from a standalone computer sitting in a box to a completely virtualized part of a global cloud infrastructure in which computation moves where it is needed at a moment’s notice. Similarly, web clients have changed from the traditional desktop PC with a browser to a myriad of devices that sense and interact with the physical world and connect with other devices through web servers sitting in the cloud.

If we think about the changes that the Web has undergone, what makes them so breathtaking is not merely that they’ve happened at a dizzying pace, but also that they’ve happened without central control or coordination. In a word, it is evolution in action. New ideas and solutions are constantly introduced to accommodate new demands. These ideas compete with old ideas; sometimes they win and take hold, and other times they lose and fall by the wayside.

Evolution is as integral a piece of the Web as it is of nature. And just as in nature, individual components that are better suited to accommodate ...