The ultimate Web 2.0 metaphor: Legos | News.blog | CNET News.com
The CNET NEWS.COM site is filled with stories about the LEGO company these days, and it warms my heart, since I’ve had a life long “love affair” with the company.
LEGO has been a metaphor for component based software development, and object orientation, for a long, long time, at least here in Denmark. I find it remarkable how many pioneers, within the field of software object orientation, are of Danish descend. I believe this is, somewhat connected, to the fact, that we all played with LEGOs
Now, if only we could get standardised Web 2.0 components, that snap together like LEGO bricks.
This absolutely is not the case today, and the standardised component technologies like COM, .NET and Beans are so much easier to work with. Web 2.0 is a step back, in terms of “ease of interoperability”, but the emergence of home grown services, and so called mash-ups, where several services and components are combined, to create new services, has been no less than phenomenal, and has created a number of DIY toolset (APIs) for the web garage, the most well know is probably the Google Maps APIs.
The standardised web-service protocol stack (WS*), has failed to deliver the high-level services, that are being build right now under the label Web 2.0.
The WS* stack is a bit like having the interlocking, but not the component. And the Web 2.0 applications are largely the components, but with incompatible interlocking.
Eventually the Web 2.0 components will mature, and standards will emerge, and we’ll have the software equivalent of the interlocking genius of the LEGO brick.
But I’d say that the sacrifice of standards, at the “altar of innovation”, has been worth it, but that it’s time to “grow up”, and agree on some standards for “interlocking”.
When this happens, it will be remembered as the day, the “mash-up” industry was created. Web 3.0 anyone?