New in the Ibuildings blog today, there's a post from Ivo Jansch talking about using a pluggable architecture to help make your applications more robust and simpler to maintain. One key to this is the introduction of data sourcing.

The first versions of most projects are self-contained applications. They work as-is, without any connection to other applications. It often isn't until a later release that there is focus on interoperability. [...] While this is an important steps toward application interoperability, there is often an important step missing. Most interoperable applications lack one final feature that allows full seamless integration: data sourcing, or the ability to get the data it needs from elsewhere.

He talks about two types of data sourcing - synchronization and federation (pulling the data as needed). He also gives a few examples of implementing this method in your application in things like your framework's models, abstracting out protocol connections and using web services (SOAP, REST) to make the connections. He also briefly touches on a very important topic to keep things in line - standards.