Web as platform

Our understanding of the Web has matured to the point where we believe it is a viable platform for building distributed systems. RESTful techniques have advanced past pretty URIs + JSON towards hypermedia systems that project business protocols over the Internet and support seamless business process and service composition. The Web provides a powerful capability for scale, resiliency, and ease of implementation with commodity infrastructure like caches and Web servers with commodity protocols (like HTTP, AtomPub, and OAuth). Moving from trial to adopt is indicative of our position that the Web is ready for primetime, not just for Internet-facing systems but as a practical base for enterprise systems delivery.

We assist many of our clients in adapting enterprise software architecture practices to fit within an Agile software delivery approach. In the past year we have seen increased interest in evolutionary enterprise architecture and how service oriented architectures shape the boundaries between enterprise units. The value of an evolutionary approach to enterprise architecture is the creation of lighter weight systems that ease integration between disparate parts. By embracing this approach and the notion of the web as an enterprise application platform, we have reduced overall complexity of application architectures, increased quality and scalability, and reduced development costs.