Aaron Skonnard

Joel Spolsky, a long-time blogger who frequently publishes interesting software development observations, recently wrote a seminal piece entitled "The Law of Leaky Abstractions"(www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ LeakyAbstractions.html). I encourage you to take a few minutes to read it, especially if you're involved with XML Web services. It summarizes one of the growing and troublesome trends surrounding Web services development and tools. Joel's essay concludes that all nontrivial abstractions leak to some degree - they don't fully hide the underlying technologies they were originally intended to encapsulate and simplify. For example, most people drive cars, yet only a small percentage of the population understands anything about what goes on under the hood. This is a wonderfully successful abstraction that allows countless automotive ignoramuses (like me) to zip a... (more)