Web 2.0 Architectures

Creating Open Services That Last (and That Anyone Can Use)

Developers everywhere have started to access the thousands of terrific open Web 2.0 software services available on the Web, using them either to create new Web 2.0 software or to weave them into their own organizations’ systems. Mashups and web service reuse are intriguing grassroots phenomena that continue to grow.

The Web is now the world’s biggest and most important computing platform, in large part because people providing software over the Internet are starting to understand the law of unintended uses. Great websites no longer limit themselves to a single user interface. They also open their functionality and data to anyone who wants to use their services as his own. This allows people to repurpose and reuse a thousand times over another service’s functionality in their own software for whatever reasons they want, in unforeseen ways. The future of software will encompass combining the services in the global service landscape into new, innovative applications.

Writing software from scratch will become rarer and rarer, because it’s often easier to recombine existing pieces. This echoes the revolution of the object-oriented approach for software development a few decades ago, when software developers began building small, self-encapsulated chunks of software that could be used over and over again. Service-Oriented Architecture expands that evolution over disparate domains of ownership, and across functional and technical ...