Chapter 4. Strive for Transparency

In the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the fate of Frodo Baggins is tied to the ring of power. The ring provides incredible power, but at a terrible cost. In the end, it invades his sleep, every hour of consciousness, and even his relationships. He is so possessed by the ring that he cannot drop it, although it is consuming him. I've suffered projects where our frameworks felt a little too much like that ring. In the beginning, the power blinds us, and near the end, it invades the core of our being, from the design philosophies all the way to the thoughts and mood of the whole team. In fact, I've even helped to build, and sell, such a framework, a demon disguised by the false name of CORBA. I'm not alone. I've been approached to rescue many an application from a cloud of doom, whether it's CORBA, VisualBasic, EJB, or even database stored procedures and user-defined functions.

In Chapter 3, our goal was to focus our software efforts on a central task. There weren't any earth-shattering techniques. You probably already do some kind of layering, and at least understand the value of decoupling. In this chapter, you'll see techniques to take the power of decoupling to the next level. In fact, it's often important enough to decouple critical layers like your domain model from all other services from the very beginning. You're looking for transparency, and this chapter introduces the techniques that you need to get there.