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Community
May 18, 2007
What we talk about when we talk about Reuse
In his post Do we understand SOA?, Jack van Hoof makes an interesting point about the use of the term "reuse" within the context of SOA:
And then there is the widely spread misuse of some core terminology. "Experts" tend to speak of "reusable" services. But what they mean is "shareable" services, which is quite a different thing.
I've read similar comments elsewhere, and while I understand the point, I think that characterizing this as misuse of terminology is not entirely accurate.
Services in an SOA are indeed sharable, but that sharing constitutes reuse. The whole point of sharing services is to reuse the functionality individual services provide in order to eliminate the need to recreate that functionality from scratch every time it's required in some application.
Software reuse has always been about eliminating the need to repeatedly reinvent the wheel. SOA is reuse in a highly evolved state, but it's still all about reuse.
It's all good.
Would be right in stating that since SOA refers to re - usable (shared) systems or service.
Would i be right in stating that this is the same as an Architectual pattern. In that a pattern can encompass infrastructure, operating system, application or just a single operating system. Hence, this is shareable / re - usable.
Thanks in Advance,
Sakou Nkrumah
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