Seeing Links
I’m currently engaged by a small systems integrations and – oddly enough, you might think - web development company. That is to say, I’m working with a company that does web development, creative work and systems integration. I’m working on the systems integration side of things doing architecture and proofs of concept for an event driven integration platform focused around XML processing. This has involved a bit of rules based logic, arguing about defining schema upfront or letting the customer do it using RDF (it’s easy but its complicated) vs using relational databases (its complicated but its easy), a bit of coding with the DOM API, reviewing some graph orientated process definition languages (if only to prove we didn’t want one) and some thought around long running business processes involving customers in an e-commerce context (which proved we actually did), and straying into architectural issues like whether to incorporate an ESB and what the hell an ESB is anyway.
This collection of abstract issues allows me and my colleagues to spend some time thinking in the abstract, and researching topics and increasingly seeing previously obscure links between things. For example, the fact that a web design company has ended up doing systems integration using a web language like XML looks like a link, though actually its a complete coincidence which I only just saw. Other weird stuff comes up too, like the fact that the web page of a tool we’re reviewing was two clicks away from a definition of something very like what we’re building, though we only came across the definition of it (and even a related book) three months after we started to write proofs of concept. My guess is that it’ll be a useful tool.
Then came a less conceptually loaded link, in fact it was just a plain HTML link of the “if you liked that then you’ll like this” variety that lead me to an excellent InfoQ presentation on what REST is. If you’ve troubled yourself to read any of the links embedded in this article, or even if you’re familiar with some of the terms already then you’ll realise that this presentation actually sits right in the middle of the jumble touching on SOA, good web site design, and the importance of URIs as business identifiers. Of course good business identifiers are important in any system especially relational databases, almost certainly SOAs, and definately in Linked Data and in RDF and were a big topic at Linked Data Planet where I went last year so I’m seeing links stretching that way too.
Do you ever get a feeling somewhere in the back of your head of neurons rewiring themselves? You might just dismiss it as a headache but there is a particularly satisfying ache I get sometimes which is a bit like the aches the day after some strenuous excecise (another weird link) and its a feeling I get when concepts are shifting about and getting connected together in my mind. Well I have that feeling now, and the shapes being formed back there in the etched lines of synapses are pretty interesting, but are too big for one post…
