Category Archives: Architecture

Uncle Bob Challenges The Architecture of a Rails App

Uncle Bob has a very interesting keynote at the Ruby Midwest 2011 conference.

I developed apps with the fundamental architecture of the following (with dependencies only crossing one layer):

——
UI Layer
——
Business Object Layer
——
Data Mgt. Layer
——

Born from the one pattern that is king of the hill in my book: “Separation of Concerns.” The above was my architecture for all projects since the early 90s… C++, Java… but so far not so much in Rails.

I have thought about trying it, but not sure if it will pay off or not.

Essentially, it is about cleaving the rails model classes into two parts:

  1. Business Methods, attributes, business rules
  2. Persistence Methods, attributes, all knowledge of the DBMS details

In general, the UI deals with BOs, but sometimes we create dumb “Data Transfer Objects” that are lightweight versions of the business objects to be thrown about the system.

As a side note, in general, moving code to a more “object-oriented” state often ends up with the same lines of code. And often a bit more due to the boiler plate of creating additional classes.

In a current project, we have pulled out the business objects into a separate gem — but mostly because it needs to be used by our web app and by an eventmachine app.

The thing that shocked me the most about Rails, when Corey Haines introduced me to it in 2009, was that it was a lot like “Model Driven Architecture” that I had worked with for a few years. Given an architecture, a vertical slice thru the app, weave the model thru the architecture generator and out comes an application with a consistent architecture for the bulk of the app that is mostly the same (save for model/property names). Commercially, this MDA technology was a failure, last time I checked. Even though I thought it was the smartest way to develop apps, few others did. Except for Rails developers — largely because most rails devs probably have a very different mindset than other devs.

See blast from the past presentation here.

Though Bob pokes fun at Rails high-level directory structure as not revealing the business domain, I am totally fine with that. It’s a good thing. Yea, sure, it is revealing that it is an MVC style app designed to deliver web apps, so what? No matter which architecture is used, I look for the domain classes to tell me what the system is doing…

In my handful of rails apps to date, I have only used MongoDB and MongoMapper — and this is the closest I have gotten to the good old days of when I used the POET Object-oriented Database with C++ back in the late 90s. It is the closest I have been to nirvana. I basically *almost* don’t need to care that there even is a database…

One of these days, I’ll compare and contrast a Rails/MongoMapper app with and without Business Objects separated from Data Management classes.

Large-scale Separation of Concerns

Found this draft post from: “Last edited on April 20, 2009 at 4:10 pm” … Wonder where I was headed? Hah, I’ll add a 2011 conclusion.

While we have enjoyed employing Separation of Concerns at many levels:

  • Design Patterns
  • Layered architecture

I wonder if it can go farther to assist us in developing robust applications.

I have been preaching a “Dual Architecture” for eons…

  • Application architecture (features)
  • Technical architecture (code, framework)

However, I think this could be taken a bit further.

We use source code, classes, tables to be an abstraction of the underlying true system being run. The source gets converted… the classes get converted, database tables get converted… to something that the machine knows how to deal with.

User gets the functionality expected, the system does the grunt work.

The user is not too worried about the “how” it works, but rather more so that it simply works.

With software, it would be nice to be able to work at a similar higher level of intention, or functional need, with less regard to the nitty gritty detail.

After all, with most business applications, the fastest moving component is technology continually changing.

A major, large-scale SoC is to separate the Functional needs from the Technology.

Users care little if the app is built on Java, .NET, Ruby, COBOL…

2011 Addition:

Of all the languages and frameworks that I have used over the past 30 years, I would say Ruby and Rails (and it’s community) with MongoDB/MongoMapper has come the closest to allowing a greater portion of development time and thought to be spent on solving the customers needs and less time on the infrastructure nuts and bolts.And it is more than the language (Ruby) and the framework (Rails). It is the entire culture and constellation of tools and gems and community that makes a difference.

In addition, it feels like I can code more to the intention of what I need the software to do, and less about the details of the language getting in my way.