I just had a chance to read your IEEE paper. Congrats, it is well-written. However, I do have some comment on your analysis.

I don’t think the point that specialized interfaces inhibit reuse does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that “reducing interface differentiation” promotes reuse. Uniformity of interfaces lowers the barrier of entry for application development, but what promotes reuse is, in my opinion, the nature of the problem being solved by an interface. The more specific the problem is, the less likely it is to be reused. The most popular REST/HTTP APIs publicly available today are also solving hard problems that are expensive and time-consuming for everyone to replicate.

Secondly, uniform interface are not necessarily semantically richer than “as generic as possible” interfaces or even “specialized” interfaces. For instance, a RESTful version of your example “BagOfBytes processThis(BagOfBytes)” would not provide all the semantics of the data and context for a client application to use it.

I have a longish comment at my blog.

Subbu

I just finished reading an article in IEEE Computer titled "Serendipitous Reuse" (pdf here) by Steve Vinoski. There is also some interesting discussion on this article at Steve Vinoski’s blog. The central premise of this article is that unif…