It's time for change on the Web

In recent months, a number of ideas in my head have crystallized. The immediate benefit is I now know the precise direction I'm headed and my exit strategy (i.e. my dissertation topic). Since this direction has potential implications on the larger Web as we know it, the next step is to start evangelizing these ideas - infecting the larger world, if you will - in order to realize these changes outside my own horizon. In order to do that, I need to tip my hand a little bit and share where I'm going - and, consequently, where you might be going soon too.

What's the problem? What are my insights? What's my approach? What are the contributions? Dear reader, those answers can be summarized in my quad chart. This is a one-page document that I produced to my thesis committee to demonstrate that I do know where I'm going and I have a plan(TM).

I'll wait while you read it. It's short.

Next, if you want to read up on the history of architecture on the web, I recommend my survey of Architectural Styles of Extensible REST-based Applications (warning 65+ page PDF!).

Finally, let's conclude with an abstract of one of our papers currently under review:

REpresentational State Transfer (REST) guided the creation and expansion
of the modern web. What began as an internet-scale distributed
hypermedia system is now a vast sea of shared and interdependent
services. However, despite the expressive power of REST, not all of its
benefits are consistently realized by working systems. To resolve the
dissonance between the promise of REST and the difficulties experienced,
we sought insights from numerous architectures in both web and non-web
domains. Our investigation yields a set of extensions to REST, an
architectural style called Computational REST (CREST), that not only
offers additional design guidance, but pinpoints, in many cases, the
root cause of the apparent dissonance between style and implementation.
Furthermore, CREST explains emerging web architectures, such as mashups,
and points to novel computational structures in domains such as
distributed computation and multimedia streaming.

Every day, we're stumbling upon deeper ramifications of what we're working with. The latest concept we're toying with are the notion of temporality on the Web and rethinking our notion of content negotiation.

And, yes, I fully expect that these changes are going to find its way into future versions of the Apache HTTP Server. =)

Buckle up. It's going to be fun.

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