Architecture

I’ve been working on application architectures based on Uncle Bob’s Ruby Midwest talk, following the hexagonal architectural pattern. I posted an article a couple months ago showing a way that works fairly well in Rails, and some accompanying Rails example code. But there was one thing I wasn’t quite happy with. The problem is that we used callbacks (actually, a publish/subscribe mechanism) in a situation where they don’t seem to quite fit: def show interactor.on(:display) { |order| render order } interactor.on(:not_found) { |order_id| render status: 404 } interactor.get(params[:id]) end What we really want is to respond in different ways, depending on the result of the call to interactor.get(). There’s no good reason to define the responses before the call. It makes a lot more sense to define the responses after the call, because they’ll happen after the call. I’d much prefer that the code be written in the order that it will be run. ...

I’ve started working on my own framework in Ruby in the past couple days. It’s built upon my recent work at understanding Uncle Bob’s Ruby Midwest 2011 talk, and his article on Clean Architecture, and the resulting hexagonal architecture (AKA ports and adapters). Somehow my research in that vein led me to Gary Bernhardt’s Boundaries talk. I’ve read a lot about the talk, and knew about the idea of “functional core / imperative shell”. And I’ve worked with a lot of similar ideas lately. But I believe this is the first time that I actually watched the whole video. ...