My first column for IC appeared in March 2002, nearly 11 years ago. Back then my column, called “Toward Integration,” focused around enterprise middleware. My old friend Doug Lea, who was on the IC editorial board at the time, suggested that I write it, and who in their right mind would turn down Doug Lea? In March 2009 I stopped that column and began writing the “Functional Web” column, focusing on the use of functional programming languages and techniques for web development. Prior to writing for IC, I was a columnist for the C++ Report magazine, starting in January 1995, and then later continuing that column over in the C/C++ Users Journal. That column focused on distributed object computing, and I stopped writing it in 2005.

That’s a total of 18 years as a columnist, which is a lengthy duration for a side gig done on my own time (and for IC, done on a purely volunteer basis). My common goal for all the columns was to write for practitioners like me — to try to cover topics, approaches, and ideas that other software developers could immediately apply in their own work. I also saw column writing as a way to try to pay back all the authors from whom I had learned so much over the years.

But 18 years is enough, for now anyway. While I might return to publishing in the future, for now I just want to focus on technology and software development.

Thanks to all my readers for your feedback and encouragement over the years. You definitely made it all worthwhile.

The same magazine issue is also the “Programmatic Interfaces for Web Applications” special issue that Tomas Vitvar, Cesare Pautausso, and I co-guest-edited. Our guest editors’ introduction explains the purpose of the special issue and introduces the five articles comprising it:

• Toward an Open Cloud Standard by Andy Edmonds, Thijs Metsch, Alexander Papaspyrou, and Alexis Richardson
• ArRESTed Development: Guidelines for Designing REST Frameworks by Ivan Zuzak and Silvia Schreier
• Welcome to the Real World: A Notation for Modeling REST Services by Olga Liskin, Leif Singer, and Kurt Schneider
• Communicating and Displaying Real-Time Data with WebSocket by Victoria Pimentel and Bradford G. Nickerson
• SOAP-Based vs. RESTful Web Services: A Case Study for Multimedia Conferencing by Fatna Belqasmi, Jagdeep Singh, Suhib Younis Bani Melhem, and Roch H. Glitho