Saturday, October 20, 2007

It was programmed with...

Lately I have been seen people at work saying "I built that system using Php" or "We should build all our applications with Java" or "All our applications should be built with Ajax" or "We should (or should not) use Java/J2EE", but in the majority of the cases it turns out that the final product is something that is not built with a single technology but a combination of several ones... and the problems with that show up when we start to integrate applications:
  • Integrating this applications will be easy they both use WebServices (Yes, but one of them uses JSON, another SOAP, another REST and another used Hessian)
  • Lets combine this two web applications in to a single one (Yes, but one of them is built using Spring+Hibernate and the other was built with JDBC+Home Made Wannabe Framework)
  • The architecture of this applications is very similar they are both OLTP applications, integrating their code bases will be easy (or exchanging developers between them will be easy) and it turns out one of them is built using Stored Procedures in PL/SQL, another uses TopLink and the last one uses IBatis.
  • This two applications are AJAX bases it will be easy to integrate them (or exchanging developers between them will be easy) .... ups, they use to completely different and perhaps even incompatible AJAX frameworks

So... are we really saying something that somehow resembles the truth when we say "I built that application with XXXX"? I think not... but then... why do we keep saying stuff like "That was built in Java" if there are 1000 different ways to build it with Java.... 1000 ways to build with AJAX, 1000 ways to build it with PHP, 1000 ways to build it in .NET ... and millions of ways to build it, if we start combining this "base" technologies.

No comments: