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Software Fashion - A Maker Or A Killer!

Software Fashion - Software Reality

Like any industry, the software world suffers its own fashions. We often see new technology bound onto the software stage with a great fanfare. "Everybody's talking about it! Digital Code Scrubbing is the future! All code should be scrubbed!" Then, after a year or two, the new technology quietly skulks away into the fashion graveyard, when people begin to realise that the technology just hadn't delivered on its many inflated promises.

With EJB a big issue was remoteness for the sake of it. People imagined that we lived in a Star Trek era, where location, bandwidth and speed were all unlimited. As a result, people created systems with everything remotable, just in case, seeing that as a virtue. When it was eventually realised that this just wasn't working, the EJB spec was "fixed" with the joke that is local entity beans, which rather seems to go full circle.

Most new technologies have their place; their appropriate usage. Whatever the initial idea, the marketing spin tends to be that fashion X will cure disease Y (e.g. development will become faster, more scalable or more agile). However, a good idea can often be over-hyped to the extent that products get applied in all sorts of crazy, inappropriate ways. You would think that an industry like ours wouldn't be this starved of innovation that we need to hungrily devour every moderately good idea whenever one happens to wander by.

It's important to keep yourself immune from the hype that inflates software trends into fashions. To do this, you need to remain objective: to assess a product or API by its merits (and its originally intended purpose), rather than by how popular it is.

I need to keep this in mind while embarking on new design stuff!