Have you heard of SOA? Service Oriented Architecture. What does that mean for you?
Well, considering you're reading something on blogger, there's an API behind the scenes doing heavy lifting. A lot of this can be considered part of an SOA world.
SOA can take familiar applications and put them easily on the web. Actually, taking existing applications and moving them to a SOA world is much harder, but after that is built, ingesting the outputs from an SOA system is quite easy. Why does that matter? Think of your cell phone, a lot of the interoperability comes from SOA, such as being able to check your Facebook information, update your location based on your GPS co-ordinates, etc. These are all applications built because Facebook built a front-end for people to write applications for.
SOA made it possible for me to post this without the use of the web client. Since I can create applications far more robust on the operating system side, then publish to a website, this is the simplest of SOA systems available.
Here's some articles to get you started - Getting familiar with SOA.
What you might not know is that much of the internet and specifically Web 2.0 is using SOA. Facebook, Amazon, Google, MySpace, etc. all have some sort of SOA
What does that mean to you? The world is becoming even more connected. With the Internet applications being available, anyone can get started and build your own web application. Its not as hard as it sounds. To see it, sometimes with the right plugins, you only need a good IDE and the ability to draw.
Draw? What's this about? I'll save that for another post. Also for another post, how to test an SOA application and how to break it. For some quick info on the testing side, here's some articles for you.