Design Strategies for a Distributed Web

From language frameworks to APIs

Everyone is making use of mature and stable web application or javascript frameworks these days. That means we’ve stopped reinventing things such as routing and object relational mapping, but we’re all still building very similar components again and again. Frameworks might allow us to solve lots of fine grained problems but APIs could let us solve common course grained problems quicker.

Building blocks for your applications

Their are already a few examples in the wild of APIs designed to be used as part of your application development process. Amazon has been leading the way in providing remote services such as S3, EC2 and SimpleDB. Their are also options when it comes to hosting these services yourself, the mint analytics software and the CouchDb database service are both good examples.

Quality engineering for free

The real value of outsourcing a discreet portion of your application to a third party API lies in quality. You could always use local storage and your programming language of choice to deal with a large volume of file read and write operations. But do you really think you’ll beat Amazon for reliability, scalability and speed?

Functionality vs Data

It’s not just high quality functionality that we could leverage from other providers. We’re all fed up with entering and re-entering our personal data into each new service. With advancements like OAuth and Microformats and lots of focus on data portability at the moment we might just be able to share data too.

Change the client as well as the server

Sometimes it’s not enough to just change the server. The rise of specialised browsers such as Joost and Songbird allows for functionality that would be impossible otherwise. Site specific browser, along with advancements such as local storage, may prove

Problems

It’s not all in place just yet. The reliability of your application is likely to be important, and making use of a distributed set of APIs could leave you in the unenviable position of being less stable than your least stable partner. The issue of lock-in could also raise it’s head, without a vibrant ecosystem of different providers that is.

The Future

The use of third party commercial APIs has the potential to change the development landscape – bringing high quality middleware to the web. It could be the original web services dream realised. But without critical mass and an active market it could also be a new achilles heel for successful startups.