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Michael Champion wrote, > At some point, we know that the "just write a few lines of code" > approach breaks down.... or at least that is the conventional > explanation for why Enterprise Application Integration didn't live up > to its hype a few years ago. (N x N little adapters turns into a big > job as N gets large ...). Except that it isn't O(n^2), because when n gets large it's very rare that everybody needs to be able to talk to everybody else. I have no evidence to back this up, but I conjecture that the scaling is much more like O(n log n) or better. OTOH, I believe that the effort involved in getting n parties to agree on a common schema or ontology or API scales at O(n^2) or worse. I haven't much evidence here either (other anecdotal from experiences on too many working groups of one kind or another), but intuitively it's due to a mixture of conflicting interests and the fact that the common schema/ontology/API would be hard to change if adopted, so has to be finessed for flexibility and extensibility far more than would be even faintly reasonable for a more local and partial solution. So, perhaps paradoxically, I believe the exact opposite of the received wisdom: mutual agreement on common schemas or ontologies works well in the small; but in the large, piecemeal mapping wins. Cheers, Miles
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