After reading through The Server Side article and the documentation it's my understanding that Hivemind services should small and fine grained. Assuming that I've got that aspect correct, my question would be, what is too small? For example, in the article there is a RegistrationService, UserFactory and UserRepository. If I was to start a design from scratch the most logical design for me would be to combine the RegistrationService and UserFactory into a single UserService and then keep the UserRepository as is. How do you guys decide when a service is fine grained enough, or in the alternative, what is too fine grained?
My second thought topic involves application installation. I'm going to use a standard J2EE web application for examples sake. From my experience, you'd first set up your container as necessary (database connections, javamail sessions, etc.) and then deploy your war or ear. At that point, however, most applications still have a good amount of application specific that still needs to be done. For example, setting up default preferences, creating the first admin user, etc. In the past I've simply had all of that in the database sql initialization scripts. It seems to me, however, that Hivemind presents some interesting opportunities to make this more user friendly. For example, an InstallerService could have a contribution point which takes Installer services. These can provide (if we were using Tapestry) a Tapestry component and label. The InstallerService can use a Wizard component which pages through the different Installer component contributions. The individual Installer components could use ApplicationDefaults for the default values. Then the Tapestry front end can check with the InstallerService to see if installation is complete. If it isn't, it can redirect to the wizard which allows the user to do the initial configuration.
Hopefully this isn't too off topic for the list, but I'm really interested in what people think about these things.
--Chris
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