Jeff Schneider, CEO of Momentum Software, likes service-oriented architecture. And yet, he argues that large enterprises that want to quickly roll out applications end users will actually, well, use, they should go back to the Lotus Notes model - "disposable" apps written and rolled out quickly.
He acknowledges: "Most talented engineers hate environments like Lotus Notes. They roll their eyes thinking about scripting hell, inability to enforce uniform constraints and business logic, inability to leverage a common data model and perhaps most significant, it allows dumb shits to look smart."
And yet, he says, back in the day, when his shop used PowerBuilder for Big Applications and shuffled off the developers who sucked to Notes programming, a funny thing happened: "Our users started telling us that they wanted the new application to be done in Notes (not PowerBuilder)." This is because the Notes people could turn out apps that worked reasonably well, and quickly, and that the collaboration promoted by Notes was more useful than the "common data model" enforced by PowerBuilder. And the end users could often tweak the apps themselves.
Web services, he argues, are no different:
"It may hurt your ego but it will be kind to your wallet. The real trick is to determine how to design a service network to facilitate disposable applications. It should be possible to create a constrained and structured set of services that contain the end development environment enough to allow 'power users' to do their thing. Then, it is off to the races."
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