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June 06, 2007
Specific solutions vs general solutions
Specific solutions vs general solutions: Yesterday Steve Cutter covered a debate about JavaScript libraries in ColdFusion being larger than needed for a specific use... today Dare Obasanjo suggests that Google Gears may be useless because there isn't an out-of-the-box data synchronization feature. I think both discussions may miss that it's cheaper to build a solution for a specific problem, than it is to build a general solution which can be applied to an entire class of similar problems. It's easier to hack a particular solution than it is to architect a general solution. And once a general solution architecture is available, there's always the question of it being better to use the general solution (with benefits in development time, testing, and maintainence), or bang out a one-time solution for the particular problem at hand (with benefits in codesize and customization). I think it's okay that the current Google Gears doesn't try for a universal solution to data synch -- as their architecture docs show, there's great variance in current applications even without the problem of synchronization, and today even a particular synch solution would be tricky, much less an early attempt at a general solution. Summary: It's easy to build a fishing pole from a stick, a string and a pin, but that doesn't mean that modern fishing-pole factories are bloated or useless... agree, disagree, other...?
Posted by JohnDowdell at June 6, 2007 07:26 AM
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