lesscode: The pragmatic’s guide to Web architectures :

The Web thrives not because it uses a strict architectural style and a coherent technology stack. It thrives because so many sites pay little attention to REST and choose to focus on their users instead. It thrives because mal-formed HTML pages include GIFs and PNGs and Flash and badly written JavaScript that just works. It thrives because people go on the Web to send e-mail, IM, do VoIP and trade BitTorrent files.

The search for the holy grail, the one technology to rule them all, is as old as technology itself. I’m fine knowing we’ll never settle the score, never know whether Vi is truely better than Emacs, or whether Eclipse shadows them both. But unless you’re a vendor making money on one horse, it doesn’t matter to you.

If you’re a pragmatic developer, you have one tool in your toolbelt that always wins the day. It’s the ability to think, ask questions and make choices. To choose solutions that are best for the problem you’re tackling right now. And to keep learning. Because there will always be some new technology that’s better at solving some use case or another.

The only architecture that matters is the simplest one you can get to solve the problem at hand