This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Java Buzz by Bill de hÓra. Original Post: 4 years ago Feed Title: Bill de hÓra Feed URL: http://www.dehora.net/journal/atom.xml Feed Description: FD85 1117 1888 1681 7689 B5DF E696 885C 20D8 21F8 Latest Java Buzz Posts Latest Java Buzz Posts by Bill de hÓra Latest Posts From Bill de hÓra

"Designing protocols is hard work. It takes smart people a long time to come with good ones, and the skill and mind sets to do it are rare, much rarer than folks who can design great APIs. Indeed protocol and API design are dealing with sufficiently different sets of problems that Sun's Geoff Arnold reckons they could be exclusive to some degree and Mark Baker thinks to switch from one to the other requires zen-like mental gear shifting. GUI toolkits built on top of protocol construction toolkits won't altogether save you from banging your head off the monitor in frustration as you design the thing. Consider that being able to reinvent something really really fast might not be as smart as re-using what already exists. And no matter what you might come up with for your business problem, it simply will not be battle-hardened the way globally deployed application protocols are." - Bill de hÓra

Datapoint and reflection: while I was co-editor of AtomPub (RFC5023), which happened after I said that, it took over two years to ship, and that's after people like Joe had been working on the protocol for years previous. So great,  AtomPub now sweeps all before it and is the new hotness. But I can still think of things I need on top of AtomPub (category posting protocol, sync, multipart).  The point is you really don't knock these things out to schedule. I think this is why the best core tech increasingly comes out of open communities. Almost no commercial entity is allowed the scope for that kind of platform work anymore.