Welcome to "The Functional Web"

For me, this magazine issue completes a transition I began two years ago. The previous issue marked the end of the seventh year of the "Toward Integration" column, in which I wrote about issues related to middleware and enterprise integration. One of the points I frequently tried to drive home in that column is that change is inevitable and that it's generally better to embrace it rather than futilely try to prevent it. The transition I'm referring to started when I chose to leave the middleware industry after 16 years. At that point, I initiated the task of refocusing "Toward Integration" toward the Web, which I see as a far more capable, flexible, and cost-effective approach than traditional enterprise middleware for many integration and distribution projects. With this issue, we bid a final farewell to "Toward Integration" and with it, the final vestiges of my focus on the world of enterprise middleware and say hello to "The Functional Web." In this column, I intend to continue writing about Representational State Transfer (REST) and the Web, specifically concentrating on developing production-ready RESTful Web services using functional programming (FP) languages and techniques.