Yesterday I was wrong

The Crazy Talk Series – An introduction to an alternative web architecture and construction method

If you have met me or worked with me in the last 15 years or so, you will know that I am pretty mad about the web as a platform, HTTP as a protocol and HTML as a state engine. Add to this the last 6 years or so practising agile techniques while building highly scalable websites and you tend to find that I have fairly unusual views in the field about how to build and architect web applications.

A lot of people say to me, Dan, you must write about X as the industry seems to be doing Y and while I find it very easy to talk in a face-to-face conversation or even a mailing list, writing an article or post has always been a challenge due to the one way nature of the conversation. Anyway after some gentle nudging by Sarah Taraporewalla, Christian Blunden and Martin Fowler I have decided to jump in head first and try and create a series of articles that will hopefully open a few peoples eye’s to some alternatives.

So enough with the why and onto the what I’m planning to cover in the series:

• Caching on the wire not in the app
• Addressable components
• Personalisation, cachability and composition
• Moving state off the web server
• Web server decoupling, in-memory testing and lightning fast builds
• Some alternative libraries
• Common HTTP patterns