In a Network World article yesterday about a GridWorld panel on the promise and obstacles related to grid computing Sun’s VP of Engineering, Jim Parkinson, was quoted as saying one of the principle hurdles to grid computing is “. . . the lack of software development tools for building grid-aware applications . . ”

I don’t know Jim, so I don’t mean this as a swipe at him personally, but I think Jim’s statement shows the real problem - an assumption that people need to change the way they write code.

There are billions of lines of code in use today. There are hundreds of thousands of software engineers writing and maintaining that code. Trying to rebuild that investment is like carving a statue out of the Rock of Gibralter with a spork.

There is another way Jim, and that’s to make the grid support the software base that already exists.