October 11, 2024
My UtahJS talk, “Building the Hundred-Year Web Service”, was put online this week! It’s about how to build software infrastructure that lasts a very long time.
If you’re not a software engineer (very unlikely that you’re reading this blog if so, but it’s possible) the first 11 minutes of the talk are non-technical, and have some insights about the future of the internet that I hope to expand on soon, in other contexts. So it’s worth watching up until that point, before I start explaining to web developers how I think they should be making web services.
This is my first stab at publicly articulating something that has been on my mind for a while: is it possible to build software infrastructure with longevity and maintenance characteristics that rival those of physical infrastructure? A lot of people think this is basically impossible—our computational capabilities are increasing too rapidly, and our software is changing too frequently, that the only way to keep up is a constant and significant expenditure of resources. I disagree.
In the talk, I analogize this moment in software to the building of the Williamsburg Bridge. The Williamsburg Bridge was conceived in the 1800s, and built with horse-drawn carriage in mind, yet we’ve been able to adapt that structure to the needs of a 21st-century city (well, sort of; it should have more bike lanes, but that’s a political problem). Maintaining that bridge today, we make use of the work of engineers who could not possibly have imagined what we’re using it for; the invention of the automobile did not require us to “write” the bridge from scratch.
If you consider what software abstractions could plausibly be used to build hundred-year software infrastructure, so far there’s really only one: The Web. This talk takes seriously the idea that something you put online today could remain online and useful for 100 years, and walks through some technology choices that I believe would make that outcome more likely.
There are a lot of specifics in the second half of the talk, and this blog you’re reading now has other explainers that synthesize with that design philosophy.
And of course, the ideas expressed here are why it’s so important to (carefully, deliberately) enhance HTML with proper HTTP Method support and more dynamic functionality.