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Messages and Documents

Stefan Tilkov,

An interesting discussion got started by Mark Nottingham and triggered responses fromMark Baker, Patrick Logan and Sean McGrath. I have yet to be convinced that preferring messages/document/files over APIs in general is a good idea — it works very well in simple cases, but leads to a high dependency on internal structure in more complex ones. APIs, at least high-level ones, are there to offer a layer of abstraction. Connecting to the underlying files (or database, for that matter) can lead to a very brittle connection unless the mechanism is explicitly designed to be used for interoperation.