Well is it?
While sitting in a due diligence session with a major fortune 500 corporation, the thought of dog food overcame me as I began to describe what a team of dedicated technology professionals had build over the last number of years. As I sat there, I found myself almost defending decisions made over the those same years to a a group with little context as to why? The question is: If my dog could talk (a Black Labrador Retriever named Molly) would she say it all tasted the same? Does it all taste like chicken? And, what is the after-taste of our technloogy decisions?
As I sat there, I felt compelled to re-visit my thoughts regarding the use of EJB’s and the decisions to build a scripting language over more standardized approaches, the decision against or the avoidance of ESB. Ultimately we need to look at what we plan with a thought towards what our underlying goals are?
I harken back to the C compiler wars of the late 80′s, one where Turbo C (Borland) and Quick C (Microsoft) went neck and neck as who had the fastest compiler, which built tighter code, which was easier to use. Not only did developers at the time actively participate in the hysteria regarding a compiler, but the general public, those whom had never in their life written a goto statement is school, purchased compilers and waded through the manual for that first program to cut and paste. In the end, technology in search of a problem.
My point? Well this. Were my thoughts regarding EJB technology in search of a problem or was it the right decision? Certainly the dream of fail-over, scaling, caching all supported their usage regardless of the fact that they really never got there. Of was EJB a proof of concept for what would become Hibernate? We owe it to ourselves to challenge the assumptions of new technology as well as challenge our own plans in implementing them. Do we really want SOAP based web services when we really just need a form post? Do we really want and Enterprise Service Bus when we really just want a simple data merge?
KFB
