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.