October 11, 2007

Planned vs. Seredipitous Reuse

One problem with SOA is that it is very "heavy", with a partial focus, like CBD before it, on planned reuse.

In some industries, planned "product line" reuse has been shown to work, such as with car platforms. It's also appropriate for very general purpose programming libraries, etc., and could also be appropriate in software (there's a fair amount of "software product lines" literature out there).

From this viewpoint, "build it and maybe people will use it later" is a bad thing. SOA proponents really dislike this approach, where one exposes thousands of services in hopes of serendipity -- because it never actually happens.

Yet, on the Web, we do this all the time. The Web architecture is all about serendipity, and letting a thousand information flowers bloom, regardless of whether it serves some greater, over arching, aligned need. We expose resources based on use, but the constraints on the architecture enables reuse without planning. Serendipity seems to result from good linking habits, stable URIs, a clear indication of the meaning of a particular resource, and good search algorithms to harvest & rank this meaning.

This difference is one major hurdle to overcome if we are to unify these two important schools of thought, and build better information systems out of it.

Posted by stu at October 11, 2007 02:08 PM