New directions in web architecture. Again.

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Long time ago it was Ajax, later REST. Now we got JavaScript, Silverlight and Objective-C which we currently are using on our UX clients. Silverlight has decided to leave us, so we are stuck with the two and adding HTML5 and CSS3. Well that's in our iFacturas home-turf.
A post from O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging by Mike Loukides has the story in a broader view. Here is a part:
In the browser-dominated world, static content and data were inevitably mixed. Yes, we had templating systems that let developers separate static content and design elements from data. But once the application server did its magic, what was delivered to the browser was HTML pages mixing data with other content. Browsers were similar enough that, with some browser detection hacks on both the server and client side, it was relatively easy (though a pain) to generate pages that would run anywhere. That doesn't work any more. It's naive to think that you can wrap some HTML around data and be done with the job; the chances are that you're leaving a huge chunk of your human audience behind, and making things more difficult for another audience -- machines that just want to consume your data. To build a modern application, developers must focus on the data: they must see themselves as data providers, they must develop documented and stable public APIs for accessing their data. Over the past few years, we've realized the importance of data. What's the value of Google without the data behind it? Or Facebook? Or, going back 15 or so years, GNN? It took a long time for us to understand the importance of data, as opposed to "content." But when you've gotten that lesson, your design goals change: designing and publishing a stable API to a data service becomes the highest priority. 


That's the driving force behind this architectural shift. Front ends, user interfaces, clients, apps, whatever you decide to call them, don't disappear. But we have learned how important it is to keep the data interface separate from the user interface. Your next project will probably have multiple front ends, some delivered through HTML5, and some delivered through native code. Building them on a common data API is going to be much cleaner and simpler. In addition, third parties can build their own apps on top of your API. An important component of Twitter's success has been the ecosystem of applications that have built on their data: TweetDeck, TweetGrid, Tweetie, etc.; Twitdom, the Twitter applications directory, lists more than 1,800 apps. Until the "new Twitter" went live, the Twitter website was significantly less capable than most of the third-party apps. 

Although it has been a long time coming, we're finally finishing the revolution that started with Ajax. Get data that users care about, make it available via an API, provide a data presence that's distinct from your HTML-based web presence, and build multiple front ends to serve your customers, on whatever platforms they care about. Your value is in the data.

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