Joho the Blog
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March 18, 2003
Ben Hammersley, noting that a change in one site's query parameters broke another's plug-in, writes:
True enough. And since the initial site's change actually broke Ben's page, we can all Feel His Pain. But remember the old tightly coupled days when we thought that CORBA was going to provide the Nirvana of inter-application integration? Tight coupling works if everyone agrees to it ahead of time, but no one does, so it doesn't. As Jonathan says:
Jonathan concludes: "...on a personal level the interconnectedness is a mess that frankly I can't see the end of." Obviously, there are ways we can make the loose coupling less fragile: registries, for example. But the Web is always going to be a little bit broken, as Tim Berners-Lee supposedly said. That leaves a whole lot of ways in which the Web works surprisingly well. Posted
by D. Weinberger at March 18, 2003 09:38 AM
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Comments
In fact, that whole episode shows precisely how the SPLJ idea works. The change that broke everything was 3 steps up the line from me, and they have no idea I exist, most likely, but by using my loose contact with the the guy that wrote the plugin, we were able to fix this, that fixed that, that fixed the other.
In a tightly coupled system, I would have had to had a committee meeting, and perhaps some PowerPoint. In a SPLJ system, we just fixed it. (and took the opportunity to make the whole thing better at the same time, which is something that struck me. If it hadn't broken, it would never have gotten better.)
Posted by: Ben Hammersley | March 18, 2003 10:42 AM
Well, ok. If we're comparing the web to CORBA, a little bit broken is still functional, and I WAS able to figure out what had gone wrong from one end.
But comparing loosely-joined to wholly-owned, I'm a lot less stable. Perhaps I should just get over my control-freak side and learn to take the hiccoughs that inevitibly go along with the empowerment of relying on others. cool...
Posted by: Jonathan | March 18, 2003 10:59 AM
Ben and Jonathan: Two very cool responses. Thanks.
Posted by: dweinberger | March 18, 2003 02:25 PM