This discussion doesn't really belong here, but I'm not sure where else it belongs, and I sure would hate to stop, because its interesting and valuable.
Hilmar, are you referring to various quick-and-dirty BioPerl modules, for instance, as cases in which software that ended up being reusable started out as part of a reusable software package? Are there other kinds of contexts where this would work? How could we get different developers working on the same architecture, building a shared foundation but creating different solutions from it?
One idea used in nexplorer3 (and in some other viewers) is a Model- View-Controller design pattern that separates the business logic from the user interface.
It seems to me that ATV has been pretty successful. I've seen half a dozen sites that use it (that's a success by my standards).
Arlin
On Oct 22, 2010, at 12:38 PM, Hilmar Lapp wrote:
On Oct 22, 2010, at 12:22 PM, William Piel wrote:
We need to be okay with seeing a rich plethora of quick-and-dirty efforts, each focusing on articulating/investigating sets of novel ideas -- despite some obvious redundancy in some of the more general functions. And then periodically, someone's got to assemble the best of these ideas into a robust, jack-of-all-trades, off-the-shelf software package.
That sounds nice indeed, but frankly I've never seen it happen. The quick-and-dirty efforts that I have seen become standard parts of reusable and sustainable software have almost all started from their early beginnings as parts of reusable software. For a while rather experimental and unstable parts, obviously, but the future course was charted not as an afterthought.
Truth of the matter is that we're all scientists. No scientist is interested in, or gets promotion, scientific recognition, or publications from assembling entirely incompatible, mostly redundant except for a few features, quick-and-dirty pieces of software into some grand jack-of-all-trades software package.
My $0.02, from about 13 years of software engineering.
-hilmar
=========================================================== : Hilmar Lapp -:- Durham, NC -:- informatics.nescent.org : ===========================================================
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------- Arlin Stoltzfus (arlin@umd.edu) Fellow, IBBR; Adj. Assoc. Prof., UMCP; Research Biologist, NIST IBBR, 9600 Gudelsky Drive, Rockville, MD tel: 240 314 6208; web: www.molevol.org