minor9th.com - a weblog about life and music by Simon Pearson

Service-oriented vegetables

posted in Computers, Design

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Being a mere lightweight in the world of development, I don’t read as deeply into application methodologies as some. However, I’ve been paying a lot of attention to service-oriented architecture recently: where I’ve used it in the past, where I’ll use it in the future.

It struck me that our staff restaurant at work is a prime example of when coarse-grained services can go wrong. Here’s a snippet of the menu:

• Monday: vegetable cottage pie
• Tuesday: vegetable lasagne
• Wednesday: moroccan tangine
• Thursday: vegetable goulash
• Friday: fish and chips day (doesn’t really fit into the point I’m making so ignore it for now, but it’s good for hangovers)

Almost without fail, Monday to Thursday’s dishes contain: celery, onion, green pepper, courgette, carrot, peas, apricot(?!), and then are put together with something else, be it potato, cheese and pasta or tomato.

In not-very-l33t speak, the canteen calls on the trusty getVegetables service which returns some incongruous pile of mush, before invoking the hastily cobbled together hideItUnderAThickLayerOfMash method (which in turn uses the dreaded smash.dll)

This sort of lazy one-size-might-fit-all approach is something that creates disappointing end products that might be cheap and quick to build, but don’t really serve anyone very well. What about environments in which both creatives and developers have high standards, short deadlines and complex requirements? Sound familiar? What if, to continue this tenuous metaphor, the onion needs to be in the mash, not in the veggie goop?

It occurs to me that harnessing the power of SOA requires a lot of planning and objectivity - which is really challenging when individuals clamour loudly and endlessly (and often with good cause) for that one feature that they need yesterday.