Working Effectively with Legacy Code

Chapter 15: My Application Is All API Calls

Build, buy, or borrow. It’s a choice we all have to make when we develop software. Many times when we’re working on an application, we suspect that we can save ourselves some time and effort by buying some vendor library, using some open source, or even just using significant chunks of code from libraries that come bundled with our platform (J2EE, .NET, and so on). There are many different things to consider when choosing to integrate code we can’t change. We have to know how stable it is, whether it is sufficient, and how easy it is to use. And, when we do finally decide to use someone else’s code, we’re often left with another problem. We end up with applications that look like they are nothing but ...