Re-use

Thanks for the Alan Jackson number, a good back-to-basics worship song.

I have to agree with what you are saying about SOA/ESB not giving us anything new. I'm afraid that these are just the latest buzz words in a long history of buzzwords that won't amount to much in the overal scheme of things. Take "on demand" for instance - please. Or even Java, I mean, who cares?

And you thought that you were cynical :-) These days I am thinking that technical jobs are solely in the domain of "young" folk. As I age, I find my interest in IT waning, the trouble potentially is that there will be nothing else to fill the interest gap within me. Then again, that gap is always shrinking as the clockspeed of my brain seems to be reducing. There are longer and longer periods (but still usually in fractions of a second) between my consciousness checking-in with "the reality of this world" - this has the effect of making time appear to pass more quickly for me.

I'm currently on episode 5 of a 7 part documentary series called "The Long Way Around" in which Ewan McGregor (yes - Obi Wan) and Charley Boorman are driving around the world on big BMW bikes. For 115 days (well that is the plan) in 2004 they went from London to New York, East to West (thus the title of the series). It's a very entertaining and well done piece of work. In episode 4 which takes place in Mongolia, Ewan realises that the woman who carries two buckets of water on either end of a stick thrown across her back from the stream to her house is no less happy than the woman who pours water from a tap in London. He is struck that no matter where he goes people are the same, they love their children and they need to eat and sleep. We're all the same but we're screwing up the world says Ewan. The recommendation of this series is probably the best thing my mentor ever did for me!

On re-use, my preacher re-uses The Bible every sunday. Ah but this is not code reuse. Well, if you code any statement, say an "if", you are re-using the code in the compiler/interpreter that turns the "if" into 1's and 0's that the processor can understand, so re-use at that level happens often.

Object oriented programming really introduced the idea of re-use that most programmers think of - the ubiquitous class library. And it's true that languages like Java and C++ make heavy re-use of existing class libraries. This is not of course application code re-use. But as more and more of the application disappears into the middleware, this type of re-use will happen through osmosis.

Shame that the whole programming model needs to change for the massively parallel systems that are coming, led by the cell and perhaps this azul chip. A lot of previously re-used code now has to be thrown away.

In terms of a business writing application code, you're going to see re-use for common routines such as program start, error handling, logging and termination, but there will usually be around (I would guess) 50% or so new code in any program, Web Services or otherwise, that they write.

A question for you .... "is batch processing dead?"

The background is that batch was introduced during a time when processors were slow and expensive. Now they can multiprocess things pretty much immediately, so what is the benefit of the potentially archaic batch window?