I did it again. For the second session of the day I chose to learn about TDD and IoC. This time two other people showed up and the speaker was AWOL. So now I’m sitting in a session entitled “What’s Happening in Architecture?”. It’s a free-wheeling discussion amongst ten people including a moderator, and, in the audience, Martin Fowler.
Take away points in no particular order, and with no comments from me because I haven’t yet had much actual experience with any of it:
- WCF is very good, useful stuff. BizTalk is a lot of “unnecessary stuff” that brings nothing additional to the table over WCF.
- MVC architectures, with a properly designed model, are a joy to work with and manage complexity well.
- Having forms directly communicate with each other doesn’t scale. Having them communicate with a model which then fires events that other forms are listening to, works better.
- SOA looks like it’s really poised to take off in the enterprise.
- Distributed objects (a la CORBA) don’t work. Horizontal scaling (where you add hardware to improve performance) is the way to go.
- It’s a common trap to use the database as an integration tool. You end up with many apps talking directly to the same database, with the result that the database schema becomes locked and unchangeable. This direct coupling is easy at first, but becomes messy over time. On the other hand, using asynchronous messaging or some other abstraction takes more time and effort up front but over time it gets very easy to integrate new applications, and to maintain the database as necessary.
The next post in this series is here.
