Defintional Development and Relationships

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Quinton Wall's Blog | August 31, 2007   4:13 PM | Comments (0)

I have been doing some research on some of the new approaches to application development, the move away from packaged applications etc. One name which keeps coming up in this list is Workday. Aside from a great idea Workday is really pushing the notion of definitional development and new ways of thinking about information relationships right across their offerings and the way in which their entire enterprise platform is developed.

One of the areas where I have spoken about previously is moving away from relational databases completely to something more flexible such as some folksonomy based tagging store or a pure object orientated model such as that proposed by Workday. In Workday's case the object definition is the data model rather than hooking it to relational table structures which are cumbersome to change once you start implementing applications on top of it. This sort of application decay is what is causing many of the complexities we face right now.

So this is all well and good for new applications or software as a service vendors but lets face it, the vast majority of organizations have plenty of legacy and heritage applications out there that can not be magically changed overnight. Does adding definitional layer above this help? Well, yes, it will certainly stop the bleeding and free resources to focus on innovation (this has been one of the premises of SOA from day one...the tricky thing is getting over the adoption hump!). The better answer maybe to look closer at how you can begin to mash up both old and new functionality that begins to smell a lot like web 2.0 for the enterprise (some are referring to as work 2.0). Existing application boundaries begin to blend with situational apps, intermingling with typical office functionality such as spreadsheets and calendars which leverage a BPM process that integrates with legacy apps through services and so on until you dont where new stops and old begins.

I see WorkDay as one of the leaders in new applications but there is still an evolving whitespace where convergent apps integrate in a much more fluid and dynamic environment. Differential development and object meshes are surely going to be part of that with folksonomy style relations will make relational databases as arcane as hierarchical ones were and likely make Ted Codd rethink what he called Normalization way back in 1970.

Scary that I had to reach that far back in the sands of I.T. time for the roots of Normalization and relational databases but it has been almost 40 years since relational thinking has ruled the way applications and systems are designed. Dont you think its time to think again?

So before I get flamed for blaspheming the brilliant Ted Codd the answer to my brainteaser is simple: Ted Codd, Flickr and Workday are trying to revolutionize the way data/information and relationships (the true crown jewels of any organization) are represented, managed and interacted with.

Gotta wonder what Oracle thinks about that.....

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