Monday, April 2, 2012

Hello


Welcome to this blog about Software Simplexity. Since I started developing software in the late seventies I've been on a quest for better ways to do this job, mostly through chasing reuse. I have advocated objects since the early eighties and worked for the OSGi Alliance for a decade. The Alliance work was a fantastic adventure. We've been able to develop a novel architectural paradigm that over time will have a significant influence on our industry.

The last few years were spent adapting the technology for the mainstream (Enterprise) developers to solve their problems. However, many of the problems we solved could just not exist in the originally simple programming model. Since these additions made it a lot easier to use OSGi with legacy code, they created a certain amount of uneasiness with me. A feature for one is a conceptual burden for another; I like simple which usually means small or concise.

Adapting OSGi to the mainstream development is therefore not my ambition. Over the past few years I actually came to the conclusion that there are simpler ways to write (enterprise) software than many do today. However, sitting in my ivory tower grumbling about these 'stupid' enterprise developers is not very satisfying either.

A few years a ago I saw a business opportunity to work closer with non-OSGi mainstream developers on modularity. This venture, which I like to keep confidential for the moment, requires a cloud based system. I know it would probably be wiser to select some existing (web) framework and work from there but I like to build things myself. Especially since there are a number of things happening in the industry that seem to fundamentally change the architecture of systems: the browser becoming a (very) rich client, cloud based systems, and of course OSGi maturing. Though I could go off the radar and work on this in secrecy, I've decided to be brave and record my progress (and likely struggles) in this blog.

So if you're interested in seeing my progress and struggles, follow this blog! If you have feedback, do not hesitate to respond with comments. Just one thing, I am not interested in big frameworks though pointers to cohesive (small) libraries are always welcome.

Peter Kriens




3 comments:

  1. I am looking forward to this, Peter, so good luck. Yes, smaller is almost always better, and today I see that convincing people of this is increasingly difficult. Of course, OSGi is my usual vehicle for such things. But my latest lament is that we, as an industry, are not getting any better at writing software, despite advanced tools, techniques and platforms. There is still a software crisis! Today software is far too often a liability rather than an asset, and this has to change.

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  2. Sounds intriguing. Can you mention the programing language if there is one?

    best wishes.

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  3. Peter - I am very interested in your thoughts on OSGi and portability of code across multiple frameworks. My primary interest is of using OSGi in Gateways and to obtain true developer scale like Android - code written for one framework should be easily portable to another framework. I find that implementations vary.
    Ashu

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