97 Things Every Programmer Should Know

Chapter 10. Choose Your Tools with Care

Giovanni Asproni

MODERN APPLICATIONS ARE VERY RARELY BUILT FROM SCRATCH. They are assembled using existing tools—components, libraries, and frameworks—for a number of good reasons:

• Applications grow in size, complexity, and sophistication, while the time available to develop them grows shorter. It makes better use of developers’ time and intelligence if they can concentrate on writing more business-domain code and less infrastructure code.

• Widely used components and frameworks are likely to have fewer bugs than the ones developed in-house.

• There is a lot of high-quality software available on the Web for free, which means lower development costs and greater likelihood of finding developers with the necessary interest and expertise.

• Software production and maintenance is human-intensive work, so buying may be cheaper than building.

However, choosing the right mix of tools for your application can be a tricky business requiring some thought. In fact, when making a choice, you should keep in mind a few things:

• Different tools may rely on different assumptions about their context—e.g., surrounding infrastructure, control model, data model, communication protocols, etc.—which can lead to an architectural mismatch between the application and the tools. Such a mismatch leads to hacks and workarounds that will make the code more complex than necessary. ...