Collective Wisdom from the Experts 183
Not every website uses these guiding principles, but many do, and the Web as a
whole uses them. However, these are only the shoulders on which the continu-
ous development of new and innovative architectures will rest.
We can learn important things from the Web’s success. Perhaps the most
important is that Moore’s Law‡ now allows us to accept a great deal of abstrac-
tion in our system design. Instead of being overly efficient with our hardware
and software, we can now think about being overly stable, overly robust, overly
scalable, and overly flexible. And we can accept the inefficiencies of our cur-
rent architectures, knowing full well that they are only a foundation for future
innovations.
Distributed systems, like the Web, are hard to design. Perhaps this is because
each of us is an individual. We treat our software systems like something that
an individual creates, centralized as we each see the world. The Web’s distrib-
uted systems have shown us the way, though. Distributed systems are harder to
conceptualize, and thus harder to create, but creating them is worth the effort.
Naturally, technology changes. Ideas and techniques change, too. The simple
Web of Fielding’s description is not the modern Web. Nor will it be the Web
of the future. The Web may not always point the way. The key to adapting to
new systems will be to design flexibility into our systems now. Only then can
we begin to create living, breathing, adaptive software systems that are ready
to integrate with new discoveries, providing the shoulders for those who fol-
low us.
‡ Moore’s Law: This law describes a long-term trend in computer hardware in which the number of
transistors that can be placed, inexpensively, on an integrated circuit has increased exponentially.