I recently found an old essay by Joel Spolsky, Don’t Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You, which I keep returning to:
When great thinkers think about problems, they start to see patterns. They look at the problem of people sending each other word-processor files, and then they look at the problem of people sending each other spreadsheets, and they realize that there’s a general pattern: sending files. That’s one level of abstraction already. Then they go up one more level: people send files, but web browsers also “send” requests for web pages. And when you think about it, calling a method on an object is like sending a message to an object! It’s the same thing again! Those are all sending operations, so our clever thinker invents a new, higher, broader abstraction called messaging, but now it’s getting really vague and nobody really knows what they’re talking about any more. Blah.
Is there an Architecture Astronauts Anonymous??
Another quote:
Remember that the architecture people are solving problems that they think they can solve, not problems which are useful to solve. Soap + WSDL may be the Hot New Thing, but it doesn’t really let you do anything you couldn’t do before using other technologies — if you had a reason to. All that Distributed Services Nirvana the architecture astronauts are blathering about was promised to us in the past, if we used DCOM, or JavaBeans, or OSF DCE, or CORBA.”
Written in 2001. Still an issue.
