It sounds like this would have made a better proof of concept than an commitment to the architecture.
The idea on the face of it is not per se a bad one, quite interesting, but the implementations are perhaps not there yet to back such an idea.
It's important to know as an architect when your vision for the architecture is outpacing reality, to know your time horizon, and match the vision with the tools that help you implement the actual use cases you have in your hand right now.
It sounds like this person might have had an interesting idea but not a working system. In another light, this could have been a good idea if all the technology was in place to support it.. but the timing and implementation doesn't sound like it was right, perhaps.
The old saying "use the right tool for the job" comes to mind, but that can be hard to see when the tools are changing so fast, and there is a risk to going too far onto the bleeding edge. Perhaps the saying should have been, "use the rightest tool you can find at the time, that gives you some room to grow, for the job"...
It was definitely an interesting proof of concept that needed some refinement. The core idea was functional services against nicely organized data streams on a flat network. Which is a really cool approach that works quite well for a lot of things.
Several of these points fell apart when credit card handling and PCI-DSS entered the picture.
The idea on the face of it is not per se a bad one, quite interesting, but the implementations are perhaps not there yet to back such an idea.
It's important to know as an architect when your vision for the architecture is outpacing reality, to know your time horizon, and match the vision with the tools that help you implement the actual use cases you have in your hand right now.
It sounds like this person might have had an interesting idea but not a working system. In another light, this could have been a good idea if all the technology was in place to support it.. but the timing and implementation doesn't sound like it was right, perhaps.
The old saying "use the right tool for the job" comes to mind, but that can be hard to see when the tools are changing so fast, and there is a risk to going too far onto the bleeding edge. Perhaps the saying should have been, "use the rightest tool you can find at the time, that gives you some room to grow, for the job"...