Speeding Up Technology: Reinventing The Wheel

Re-usability is the holy-grail of any large-scale production industry. IT is no different. This re-usability primarily manifests itself on the technical front in form of programming paradigms, reusable components and frameworks.

Programming Paradigms

Programming paradigms include computing concepts like algorithms, data structures, object oriented programming, aspect oriented programming, design pattern et al. These are fundamentals that enable programmers to 'reuse' experience. It is surprising how many developers are unaware about these things. If the team has any member who completely lacks this knowledge, training or replacement is in order as these are probably the basic pre-requisites for hiring.

Reusable Components

Reusable components can be taken from open-source communities, licensed from third party or developed in-house. In open source, Google and Apache Foundation are perhaps the biggest and most reliable contributors. There are also a lot of third party development houses that may have developed the needed components and can save the company a lot of time. It is always a good idea to not only be aware about these initiatives but to actively track them. Joining organizations like Association for Computing Machinery and attending technology seminars can help in keeping you aware and agile. Buying a library, using an open-source library or building on a tried and tested library are acceptable, and even desirable, ways of speeding up development.

Developing reusable components in-house, however, is a more tricky business. Each company, knowingly or unknowingly, does try to build upon what it knows. It is a good start but can never be enough. What is really needed is an active initiative to consciously try to build components, if not frameworks, at each step. A forum to share best practices and components across the company can multiply the benefits and speed up development significantly. In fact, bigger the company, more the benefits. The only point to be kept in mind is that this initiative should neither detract nor confuse the main objective of building the product. The danger of "initiative" turning into another bureaucratic process is an equally scary scenario.

Frameworks

The final component is using frameworks. We have seen Ruby-on-Rails, Struts, Spring et al assuming significant importance. Most of them are practical implementation of programming paradigms and demonstrate the effectiveness (and weaknesses) of the underlying paradigms. Hence, frameworks are at one higher level of abstraction than either the programming paradigms or the components. This means that efficiency gains can be significantly higher if the framework is chosen correctly. In my experience, Spring makes an excellent choice for complex, multi-tiered web applications.

In our next article we talk about IDEs.