Starting at the begining

I recently sent a note to the writers of the video show 'extra credit' essentially asking why games often seemed to be developed so inefficiently. By that I mean where in J2EE for almost every aspect of development there is a framework to base your work. Seems frameworks rather than making everything appear the same effectively do the opposite allowing the developer and business to spend there effort in key areas of differentiation.
The reply I got was a polite response James Portnow indicating that some games may reuse an engine for physic or the like, but voice and visuals couldn't be reused.

Now ignoring the slight tone of condensation of his email, especially around his comments around web apps largely being around database configuration his response raised an important question in my mind.

The reuse he was referring to was engine re-use, something common in J2EE as well. However the point he was missing was around framework re-use. I was left wondering why the very concept was a hard one to grasp. My final realisation was that open source must not have had nearly the same impact on his industry as it has had in mine.

Lets face in 90 percent of was we as developers is free to the end users. Sure it mind have cost 1/2 a billion dollars to produce but the producer is giving it away for free. The why's are complicated but the results are dramatic.

Since effectively its free and most of the effort is aimed at complementary systems (with a game you have to choose which one you buy, with a booking engine and a payment transactional service there is no such limitation). As a result the enterprise development community produces more open or shared source. It is not a sense of altruism that drives this, but vanity and laziness. In that it is easy to build a great work on top of an already ready work than from scratch and everyone wants to be somebody even if it is for a highly specialised area (J2EE) in programming with in itself is hardly mainstream.

This has resulted in the a world where most commercial ventures are actually built on more socialist, community based and dare I say it artistic roots than the games industry which the is routinely trumpeted as the artist branch of the programming tree so to speak.

Somewhere along the way I may have mislaid the point, but never fear I have found it again.
The result of this is I realised many of the paradigms I as a J2EE developer purely take as a given best practice are completely unknown outside of my community and industry so I figured why not start writing as an experiment about such things and how they might work outside of the web 2.0 j2ee versus .net world.

Also I'm sure it will give me a good place to vent and my employer encourages blogging so why not.