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The "circle of life"

As an automation engineer, I work with a form of mash ups all the time. For instance, in one process Hardy scales weigh the tanks, valves and pumps are controlled by an Allen Bradley PLC, the GUI is designed to run in Foxboro I/A, C programs to harvest information and print reports are intiated by csh scripts on a Unix OS, and statistical process data is stored in OSI/PI on the Microsoft business information net. Again, all of this is one single process.

Mash ups are "interesting" to design. They require creativity. When completed, mash ups work rather well. But, "interesting" solutions often take a meaning closer to the word in the old curse, "May you live in interesting times". Modifying mash ups and maintaining them can be much more complicated than a straightforward approach.

And, troubleshooting them can be a real nightmare. Which part broke? Concurrent process often have timing errors, where each individual block of code executes as designed, but in real-time messages are overwritten by other processes. What if the error is in the API and not in the process? If mash ups from yesteryear were not the cause of "DLL HELL", then the difference was only in semantics--or in degree.

The advantage of mash ups tends to change when your focus changes from designing them to maintaining them. Right now, the portion of the programming world covered under the current term "mash ups" is relatively new. (Programming "mash ups" have been here from the beginning, under various names.) Most people are still in the more interesting design phase.

So, should we not use mash ups because they are easy to design and then hard to work with? No. They are part of the normal development process. "Pieces parts" or "Frankenstein" systems (now called "mash ups") typically break ground in a new area. Once the paradigm is established the "vertical solutions" that are easier to maintain move in and take over. Mash ups (or what ever their next "nom de querre" will be) move on to break new ground in a new area. It's all part of the cirle of life...

Posted by: NonCartoonist   Posted on: 11/21/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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