As a web developer, I can't tell you how many hours and brain cells I've burned trying to make something that somebody else has already done. As a fan and proud member of the Apigee team, I can't tell you how happy I am that I'll never go down that road again. And neither should you.

If it's not your core competency, somebody's doing it better somewhere else. One of the promises of the web is that our ability to link will allow us to find that improved implementation, the wittier comment, a more pure experience. To a great extent, this promise has been realized in the blogging world; it's not uncommon to see a blog post written in response to someone else's article, quoting still another, with a sidebar full of links to related sources all over the internet. With that in mind, it's intriguing that there's far less evidence of this kind of collaborative notion in the world of web development.

To be sure, whenever we developers implement a JavaScript library or search the web for a way to get around what Internet Explorer is doing to our CSS, we're standing on the shoulders of giants. Using tools provided by others in this way is a step in the right direction, and can provide momentum for a more interesting web, but more needs to be done to disassemble the notion of website-as-silo. We've all seen that attempt to do things that WordPress, Flickr, or Wufoo have already implemented.

I've been just as guilty as any other silo builder out there. It took me a long time to realize, for example, that I could either build a custom movie player, and wrestle with controls and accessibility, not to mention server-side issues like bandwidth and storage, or I could put the videos on YouTube, embed them in the client's site, and deliver a better experience all the way around. That's the point: A federated web application is economical in every sense of the word, but especially because it frees me up to focus on what is truly unique and interesting about my project.

I'm certainly not the first person to make this observation. Not only does the very nature of the web suggest a collaborative approach, but the work done by Peter Nixey in 2006 serves as an excellent proof-of-concept. Nixey's eventsites application allows users to create mini-sites centered around events such as parties or conferences, but does so without storage or server logic of any kind. Instead, eventsites is a single-page JavaScript application that acts as a client to eventful, Google Maps, and Flickr. The genius here is not in the ability to schedule an event, find it on the map, or see photographs related to it. The brilliance is in the aggregation and presentation.

 This is just the tip of the iceberg. Since 2006 we've seen the rise of the API as a valid tool, opening the door to better, easier, and more creative implementations. What we need now is a way to monitor our usage of federated services, and, perhaps most importantly, a way to make them more reliable. That's where Apigee comes in.

Creative and responsible use of the work done by others helps us to fulfill the promise of the web, and empowers us to do work that is interesting, progressive, and inspirational. I'm happy to be a part of that effort, and I can't wait to see what you'll do with the tools we provide.