Thursday November 10, 2005

I was with a group of folks today talking architecture, and sure enough, we began parsing words. In fact, it happened a few times today. Tier versus layer. SOA. ESB. It's unclear to me what is more overloaded (and therefore more undefined), ESB or SOA. Good thing grid didn't come up.

Selecting the right words to relay a specific meaning is an art. I never thought that writing code or creating presentations would practically require a degree in etymology to truly understand the meaning of what I was creating. I was writing some code last night and realized I had some overloading of meaning in some JavaBeans I had created. Two different classes, same variable name, different meaning. Not good. Consistency and unambiguity are important. I checked, unambiguity really is a word. Didn't want to be ambiguous.

The problem with Grid, SOA and ESB is that the are sufficiently general that they can be broadly interpreted. Abstraction is good for an architecture, but not for the words that describe that architecture :)