Answering mail #7

In reply to the post "People: Infrastructure vs Application" I exchanged some comments with Mark Berck; here is a summary - read the full conversation under the original post.

You can visit Mark Berck's blog in Dutch at http://markberck.nl/  

mark berck said...

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Reading your post I get the feeling that you really think that Infrastructure can't be mixed with Application, while I feel that there are situation where you don't want to separate these concerns.
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adriaan de jonge said...
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What are the situations where you feel you don't want to separate concerns? I am curious whether I can address these. If not, I would be happy to acknowledge I am wrong on this one!
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mark berck said...
My opinion is, that for small businesses, stand allone applications, this is the perfect way to go.

But if your application is part of something bigger, the application uses shared data sources, publishes to other system, etc. I completly agree with your statements.

Mark

I see your point. I think it is wise to make a clean separation between

1. what is possible now
2. what is desirable later

Thinking about current possibilities, it is not always easy or possible to make a clean separation between Infrastructure and Application level. This is especially the case within smaller environments. The popularity of products like Joomla, Liferay and Access (your own example) are signs that moving away from technicalities maybe even more desirable in smaller environments than in large enterprises.

Products like Intalio may be too much for such environments. I am still curious whether a proper PHP / Visual Basic programmer could get effective results out of a product like Orbeon following the XRX pattern. I think such a product would be a nice first step also in smaller environments.