How fuzzy APIs are remaking the web
For nearly as long as the web has existed, web development has wrestled mightily with the right way to connect components over the network. This is the question of the remote API. It influences every aspect of the software we build. We sort of arrived at a tolerable compromise with JSON APIs. While these have their limitations, you have to appreciate their underlying simplicity. But the advent of AI-enabled endpoints that can mediate intent is changing the basic workings of the internet. This change is gradually reawakening an old dream, the service-oriented architecture (SOA). This time around, with luck, we’ll finally gain the flexible, discoverable, and maintainable automated service discovery we’ve longed for. Fingers crossed. Why old-school SOA failed Let’s call this burgeoning influence of AI on web architecture SOA 2.0. To understand why SOA 2.0 is different from SOA 1.0, we have to remember the trauma of the 2000s. (This may be painful but also cathartic.) The original dream o