5.4 Summary

In the end, your goal is to establish a good foundation. Since your application consists of what you start with (your middleware) plus everything that you add (your code), you've got to be careful to add only the things that you need, and only pieces that make your life easier. The Java community is becoming infamous for choosing bloated, cumbersome foundational technologies like J2EE (especially EJB) and growing functional standards until they're so complex that they are near worthless. You can learn to recognize and avoid these types of frameworks, though.

To make good decisions about your foundations, you need to consider many factors beyond technical requirements. All organizations have biases and many adopt standards that shape the solution before you even write a single line of code. Carefully evaluate your team's skills. When you're considering technical requirements, I recommend iterative development. Separate questions that affect your foundational technologies into two sets: outer questions, which can be answered immediately (at least in part), and inner questions, which come up as you're coding. In each case, communication plays a key role. In the next chapter, you'll see techniques that you can use to allow for extension.