Lets Talk About Reuse

David just wrote about reuse, I thought I’d add my thoughts. Whenever someone starts talking about reusable models, I just think about San Francisco. Not the city, the project.

You’ve probably never heard of it, but back in the day IBM had a plan to build a framework of reusable business objects. ISVs would license the classes from IBM and use the CBOs to create their applications. The theory was, you’d take a User and a PurchaseOrder add a dash of UI and you’ve got your invoicing system.

I figure, if anyone is able to pull off a reusable User class, it would be the guys at IBM research. IBM spent tonnes of money, and tonnes of time chasing the goal of a reusable domain model.

They couldn’t pull it off. No one’s building their business application using the CBOs. No one.

I don’t have tonnes of time or money to throw at some abstract concept of ‘reusable components’. Instead, I want to spend my time building kick-ass applications and leave the pluggable component architecture to someone else.