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by James Robertson.
Original Post: The soft in software
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
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Loosely Coupled refers to a recent post by Sean McGrath on software development - Sean's point is that we can learn a lot about simplicity by looking at Http:
What would a simplified software interface look like? Well, by analogy with the hardware world, it would be one that just supported the basic receive and transmit functions. A real world example? For 'receive' substitute 'GET', for 'transmit' substitute 'POST'. In other words, HTTP.
Now, as Loosely Coupled says, this is oversimplyfying some - it takes a fair bit of elbow grease to create all that simplicity :) However, the point isn't so much for the service implementor as for the service user. Look at blogs for an example - Everyone talks about SOAP, but what do the tools and blogs support? XML-RPC. Why? Simplicity - implementing XML-RPC yourself is simple; implementing SOAP generally isn't - even if you have a toolkit.
So what does this answer? It explains why so many Java developers use JSP, but so few use J2EE. It explains why consultants favor SOAP, and line developers like XML-RPC. It explains the growth in simple http based services as opposed to complex SOAP based ones. Anyway, have a look at the post.
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