Silicon Valley Musings

I have been reading John McDowall’s Weblog Fast Takes for a while. John and I worked together at Teknekron/TIBCO and he is now the CTO of InStorecard.

He has been writing some interesting things about SOAP, REST, and the role of simplicity in Web Services. I sent him this comment about his recent entry, Simplicity Rules!:

“Simplicity is an elusive quality. I think it can only be achieved by several iterations of development. In my experience, a framework’s first implementation is incomplete. Subsequent iterations attempt to provide comprehensive capabilities. This results in additional features (and complexity) that turn out to be useful for boundary conditions. To acheive simplicity, most frameworks and services require a redesign that ruthlessly pares down the capabilities to the bare essentials.

To put it another way, a good framework or service makes doing 90% of the work very easy. In the long run, it is better to write custom code for the last 10% than to increase complexity of the framework or service.”

And here is John’s paraphrase.