Recombinant Components

This is an excellent post to read. Carlos E. Perez, who usually has good thoughts day after day, discusses the how the long tail of software can be served. He argues for Recombinant Components, which is very much related to Mass Customization that we have been preaching. Read this excerpt:

The last sentence also hints to another requirement for recombinant computing. That is you customize something that already exists, its pretty basic. One cannot expect users to build applications from scratch, one should start from an existing feature rich application and permit users the capabilities to make customizations easily. The Eclipse architecture takes a step in this direction, by providing an architecture for participating it has spawned hundreds of plugins. However, Eclipse's success is not only based on its modular architecture, but because it provides impressive functionality to begin with.

Voila! Isn't this what we have been saying for two years? You build by adding to and customizing existing functionality. Of course, Cornerstone Framework as it is today only addresses one major aspect, namely Mass Customization, of it. We should learn from Obje. My idea of Rendezvous for the Web was basically something like Obje.