Business of Today is the Infrastructure of Tomorrow
Regardless of whether I agree with Jeffrey Palermo in his answer to the question: How do we ensure the long-term maintainability of our systems in the face of constantly changing infrastructure? Jeffrey first gives his definition of long-term maintainability and changing infrastructure. With the definitions his answer to this question is: Don’t couple to infrastructure.
Two questions came across my mind. First what exactly is infrastructure? In other words is the infrastructure of today the infrastructure of tomorrow. I see a trend where the business of today is the infrastructure of tomorrow. Service Orientation is one of the big drivers in this area where services covering certain aspects of the business become a commodity, because certain products and services become a commodity. I also see today’s infrastructure becoming more and more transparent. Significant investments in open standards are starting to pay of.
Jeffrey’s article takes on the aspect of object-relational mapping from a particular viewpoint. Frans Bouma commented that object-relational mapping frameworks are incorporating more advanced functions which make it harder to decouple important business aspects of our applications from these framework and tools.
In one of my previous lives, in the industrial automation, it was very common to enable transparency through standards and regulation. I consider a nut and bold to be very standardized. Taking this analogy further aren’t object-relational mappers the nut and bolds for our applications? What about standardisation?