(2003-05-22) McGrath Component

Sean McGrath on moving past Object Oriented development to Component Software. We need to stop putting our faith in adding yet more layers to a "solution" to the component problem that has dubious credentials. I speak of course of Object Oriented design. To date, OOP has shown itself to be an excellent abstraction for building tightly coupled components - say, as part of a single Windows of Java Swing program -but not a good model for inter-application components. It seems that the larger the scope of the problem, the less useful the object abstraction is... It is the larger, enterprise wide, componentization that is needed to drive recombinant growth in Web Services. Getting there requires moving past OO in my opinion. I think it is about time we seriously revisited a Loosely Coupled, data-oriented approach to componentization in which data (in XML of course) flows through processing nodes (web services) via reliable Messaging pipes (MOM on HTTP). Not an object in sight!... If we insist in treating XML as a way of getting objects to talk to each other via RPC, we will have already failed in the quest for a globally applicable, recombinative component architecture. That quest was doomed before we added XML into the equation. Remember CORBA? Remember DCOM?