Curious what people's experiences are wrt library development within an enterprise. I've been at organizations where basically everything was done via services and there was very little library usage, and I always thought that was suboptimal. Now I'm at a place where we utilize lots of libraries and they seem to pose pretty significant costs of their own.
A typical example is if we need to do something that the library doesn't support, we're faced with an unpleasant choice of updating the library itself or doing some sort of workaround/hack. The former shouldn't be that difficult, but in cases where a library was written by a different team, updating can be painful if you don't have someone with experience with the library/domain on your team, or if you have to jump through approval hoops.
I suppose this is more an ownership/organizational problem and applies to services as well, but somehow dealing with library dependencies feels more onerous.
Exactly. Integrating external libraries into another system is much harder than leveraging e.g. a RESTAPI. The OP seems to be saying that Service oriented architecture (SOA) is worse. It's definitely not. There's no "better" or "worse" here. It's just two different options with different costs of integration and interoperability. the service architecture is going to have additional maintenance overhead but provide cheaper and easier interoperability.
A typical example is if we need to do something that the library doesn't support, we're faced with an unpleasant choice of updating the library itself or doing some sort of workaround/hack. The former shouldn't be that difficult, but in cases where a library was written by a different team, updating can be painful if you don't have someone with experience with the library/domain on your team, or if you have to jump through approval hoops.
I suppose this is more an ownership/organizational problem and applies to services as well, but somehow dealing with library dependencies feels more onerous.