Software Engineering

Ran into a problem when I was maintaining a customer's site today. They wanted to upload 10 - 20 MB movies as attachments to their Drupal blog posts. The standard limit set in Drupal is 2MB. I changed the setting to no avail. There was a note at the bottom stating that my PHP settings limited the upload to 4MB. So I did a search and come up with this post. So I changed my upload_max_filesize setting to "20M" this still did not work. The problem is that PHP also limits the post size and my default config limited post size to 8MB.

I just read the article linked above and I have to tell you I am never surprised at how often I hear old ideas repackaged as new ones and then marketed aggressively like they were some kind of handed down wisdom. The truth is, SOA adds very little but a buzz word. Grady Booch was talking about loose coupling being imperative for programming in the large, as he put it, back in 1994. Back in 2000 the buzz was "Component" architectures and further back it was "Object-Oriented". The problem is not with the technologies, it is with the people.

The people doing these service oriented architectures or object oriented architectures or component oriented architectures are the ones that break the loose coupling it is not the architectures. The article mentions that OO programming looks at a CD as if it should come with a playing mechanism. If that is what the author thought OO was about, then he missed the point. I never looked at it that way and I have written thousands of lines of OO code. Why do people break the loose coupling? Because they need to meet a deadline and there is no time to "get it right" so they cut corners.