With Lukas Smith we gave the Monday keynote in this year’s International PHP Conference, titled The Internet is your application blueprint. The video is now online:

The main argument of the keynote is that even though the big promises of the Service-Oriented Architecture hype of 2000s haven’t happened, by now companies are using lots of services when building their web applications. Consider these:

Web analytics

Streaming media

Commenting

Authentication

Payments

Five to ten years ago you would have done all of these on your own, but now most websites instead get the features by integrating services like Google Analytics, Vimeo, Disqus, and Facebook Connect or BrowserID. And services are also making their way to the server side, with providers like Heroku making it easy to build your application on top of various add-ons.

This service-oriented thinking can be very powerful also when building your own applications, allowing polyglot programming where you use the right tool for each job, or simply enabling you to scale different parts of your service independently.

In addition to service-oriented IaaS or PaaS offerings, techniques like Edge Side Includes and Message Queues make this approach easy to manage.

Some good blog posts related to this: