I came across this article written in 2001 about scaling e-commerce: https://www.computerworld.com/article/2591575/scaling-up-for-e-commerce.html. The concept of microservices is being talked about but referred to as components! Quite nostalgic...<p>"A component is simply a chunk of software that performs work or provides information within a wider application. A component could be the user interface on an order entry system, the rules for how and when to increase a customer's credit limit, or a data warehouse detailing every customer transaction conducted during the past five years.<p>"According to several IT managers and analysts, to build a scalable Web architecture, managers should think of components not in terms of the software on which they're based but in terms of the services they provide."
Three-tier architecture Rational tools, XML, and BEA Weblogic. Very 2000 article.<p>There's not really enough technical details there to know for sure what they did over 20 years ago, but here's a couple of clues:<p>"A component is simply a chunk of software that performs work or provides information within a wider application. A component could be the user interface on an order entry system, the rules for how and when to increase a customer's credit limit, or a data warehouse detailing every customer transaction conducted during the past five years."<p>...<p>'"we developed once and used everywhere throughout our site," says Mitchell. "If we hadn't . . . we would have to rewrite [that] code in every page on our site."'<p>That doesn't sound like microservices, that just sounds like libraries of code. The two are not interchangable.
I think there is a difference. Components were units of code which were compiled and linked into application executables. Microservices run independently and are invoked over a network connection and protocol.