The Tiers of a Clown

From: Michael Pence (mikepence_at_nospam.yahoo.com)
Date: 06/24/04 

Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2004 12:11:50 -0400

[This is a re-post because I was informed that it was bounced from this ng
for having a naughtly word starting with s and ending with hit. (Insert eye
roll here).]

I have been in the Java world for a while, and, like most of you, struggle
to keep my resume updated with the latest in acronyms and technologies.
Still, this whole distributed computing thing (.NET, SOAP and XML) has me
scratching my head and saying: Where is the payoff?

For example, my current gig is with a largely all-Delphi shop. In such an
environment, even thinking about .NET seems just silly. Assuming good
object-oriented design (separation of concerns, etc.), we can share logic
between our applications the old-fashioned way: robust source code control.
Our (hypothetical) TCustomer class can be used by multiple applications,
whether it is presented in a web page or on a rich client. Should the need
arise, we could even move our business classes into a package to eliminate
the need to recompile and redistribute entire exe's. For now though, it
seems that simple code management combined with good design prinicples and
solid methodologies (go DUnit!) gets us awfully far.

Why would I want to add a stateless messaging layer to a typical business
app when I don't need to? If I had Java clients and Delphi clients needing
to share services, sure, I would write some nice web services with
RemObjects and use XML as my lowest-common-denominator communication device.
But in an all-Delphi world, I can use full blown, stateful objects that
don't need to serialize, encode, transmit(!) and decode text just to
perform basic opertions.

Security is built into the app and the database server. Scalability comes
from having the application run on each workstation and having a nice,
beefy Oracle box. Management of releases happens with the automatic app
updating abilites of ASTA.

Am I missing something? I am proficient in these distributed technologies,
but much of it seems to be technology-for-technology's sake: applying
layers of abstaction for some anticpated hypothetical need and greatly
upping the complexity of applications that would work just wonderfully
assuming good relational and OO design. OO, code-reuse and self-updating
exe's go an awful long way. Delphi gives it all to me way too easily. Why
pursue the multi-tier approach du jour (DCOM, COM+, CORBA, .NET...) in a
single language environment?

OTOH, going from a crowded market full of talented people -- the Java
world -- to the smokey backroom (pass that $%@#!) of the Delphi world makes
me plenty nervous. Will Borland still be here in 5 years? Will gaining still
more expertise in a boutique language like Delphi further my career?
Will the 3rd party component vendors that shine today -- DevExpress, ASTA
and RemObjects, to name a few -- be here tomorrow?

Delphi does everything I need and way more. My children and my children's
children will have Win32 emulators running on their wrist watches. It seems
to obviate the need to embrace new techologies just because the monopolists
of Redmond say -- today -- it is the Thing To Do, but using Delphi leaves me
in a very small room with a small number of (((fellow developers))) and does
little to further my marketability.

Yes, look at all of the books, look at all of the lemmings, hear the giant
of Redmond decree How it Ought to be Done. Then go back to your workstation
and write some fast, solid code that simply does it -- without leveraging
every platform in the MS product line.

Mike Pence

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