I was reading Hasaan Gomaa’s Designing Distributed and Real Time Systems with UML.
One thing that stuck me most in its dynamic modeling chapter was how he stressed again and again on setting up all the interaction points at first. Is this the difference from the cool people ? Remember what the grand old man says :
Engineer for Serendipity!
Designing a cool new application requires you to expose the maximum number of interaction points (which in turn would require a uniform interface). Any interaction point you can expose , expose! It is very conceited to assume that you can come up with all possible interaction points for your application. And if you really can, then you need to start designing bigger cooler applications .
From Wikipedia :
Web 2.0 is a trend in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aims to facilitate creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users
Collaboration! A Web 2.0 application needs to have much much more than just funky colors and rounded corners. It needs to support collaboration amongst users and the easiest way to do that is to support maximum interaction points, even if you can’t come up with a use case for it right now. Your users are smart , they will come up with something. You need to move away from your old CORBA lifestyle and think RESTfully.
Footnote : It is funny how using HTTP is , “moving away from the Old”. If HTTP is new .. what is old?
