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Jumping Off the Bandwagon


By Allen Holub
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November 1, 2005 —  (Page 1 of 3)
I’ve just won (I hope) a metaphoric knock-down-drag-out fight with a co-developer who adhered to BOD (bandwagon-oriented design) principles. The issues are interesting, and so is some of the technology.

The system architecture is straightforward: A “data collector” object collects real-time data from various chunks of hardware, all of which speak different protocols, and translates to a single XML-based protocol; a “history manager” keeps a historical record of that data; a UI-server builds a couple of multipage user interfaces. These components are stand-alone servers that talk to each other using XML over JMS.

I’ve been burned recently by several projects that were way more complex than they should have been, primarily because the developers mindlessly fixated on the “standard” BOD way of doing things, and I wanted to avoid that problem here.

Probably the most commonplace examples of BOD are Web interfaces built on the “standard” architecture: Web server, EJB-based application server and a database server typically wrapped in an object-relational layer like Hibernate or JDO. The UI must be built on Struts or JSF, etc. Though all of these technologies can work in the right situation, none is appropriate in every situation (and EJB is hardly appropriate in any situation—but that’s another column). An average-size Web application that used all of the above would be about two orders of magnitude more complex than necessary, impacting both cost and schedule.

My current battle concerned the “transport” and “persistence” layers. I’m a big believer in messaging (in the JMS sense). Message-based architectures are easily scalable, and messaging promotes loose coupling between components, so the components are easier to write as independent programs. I’ve come to live with XML as a communications lingua franca (though I don’t like it). Consequently, JMS Text messages carrying an XML payload have become my communications mechanism of choice.

My first battle was then getting my co-worker to abandon XML-RPC. The attraction of point-to-point communication protocols is familiarity—a remote procedure call, regardless of underlying transport, looks like a local procedure call. All RPC systems have problems, though: speed, configuration complexity, mismatches between the Java argument types and the argument types required by the protocol. The biggest drawback is that RPC systems aren’t scalable—it’s just too hard to throw on another server if you need it.




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