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by Obie Fernandez.
Original Post: Shallow Versus Deep in the Enterprise
Feed Title: Obie On Rails (Has It Been 9 Years Already?)
Feed URL: http://jroller.com/obie/feed/entries/rss
Feed Description: Obie Fernandez talks about life as a technologist, mostly as ramblings about software development and consulting. Nowadays it's pretty much all about Ruby and Ruby on Rails.
I added Kevin Barnes to my blogroll today, for his excellent CodeCraft blog, where he writes essays about various technology subjects. His latest one, Knowing, doing and learning lays out persuasive reasons why Rails is easier to learn and adopt than some alternatives. In particular, his argument about the "business rules dilemma" is quite interesting to me.
...in a lot of CRUD applications a good database schema is such a close approximation to a good model that adding a "model" layer seems like a complete waste of time, especially to someone early on the learning curve. Of course, as the application grows and becomes more complex the lack of a well thought out model will mean lots of duplicated code as the business logic spreads out across many different views. The ideal system would be one that allows you to have a model "for free" without any additional coding OR learning cost.
If you've heard me speak about Rails lately, you know I've been referencing a Dan North meme about shallow vs. deep applications. It applies to Kevin's comments above in the sense of the "depth" of the code between the view and the database. Lots of Rails apps are "shallow". They don't have a huge domain model with tons of business logic and interactions. Traditional "enterprise" applications, some of them anyway, are "deep", that is to say, that persistence is way down underneath a huge, complex, domain model. Rails doesn't target deep applications right now, and probably never will (not with the core team's blessing anyway).
...the pet store example did more to create bad J2EE code than anything else because it taught a generation of Java programmers how to write web applications in all the wrong ways. Second, he claims that J2EE is the best framework for writing "enterprise" applications, but that you can't do it right unless you have a team consisting entirely of J2EE experts.
Considering the quality of the guidance built into the framework, would you rather throw a team of non-expert developers at an "enterprise" application using Ruby on Rails or J2EE?
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