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Remember when microservices were called components?

2 points by fabcomm ↗ HN
I came across this article written in 2001 about scaling e-commerce: https://www.computerworld.com/article/2591575/scaling-up-for-e-commerce.html. The concept of microservices is being talked about but referred to as components! Quite nostalgic...

"A component is simply a chunk of software that performs work or provides information within a wider application. A component could be the user interface on an order entry system, the rules for how and when to increase a customer's credit limit, or a data warehouse detailing every customer transaction conducted during the past five years.

"According to several IT managers and analysts, to build a scalable Web architecture, managers should think of components not in terms of the software on which they're based but in terms of the services they provide."

3 comments

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GianFabien
I think there is a difference. Components were units of code which were compiled and linked into application executables. Microservices run independently and are invoked over a network connection and protocol.
cratermoon
Three-tier architecture Rational tools, XML, and BEA Weblogic. Very 2000 article.

There's not really enough technical details there to know for sure what they did over 20 years ago, but here's a couple of clues:

"A component is simply a chunk of software that performs work or provides information within a wider application. A component could be the user interface on an order entry system, the rules for how and when to increase a customer's credit limit, or a data warehouse detailing every customer transaction conducted during the past five years."

...

'"we developed once and used everywhere throughout our site," says Mitchell. "If we hadn't . . . we would have to rewrite [that] code in every page on our site."'

That doesn't sound like microservices, that just sounds like libraries of code. The two are not interchangable.