Hi, I am Gregor Hohpe, co-author of the book Enterprise Integration Patterns. I work on and write about asynchronous messaging systems, distributed architectures, and all sorts of enterprise
computing and architecture topics.
Find my posts on IT strategy, enterprise architecture, and digital transformation at ArchitectElevator.com.
When Mario asked me at the Microsoft MVP Summit to do a PodCast on the layering pattern I at first thought that this would be slightly boring. However, once we started talking we realized that there are a lot of nuances and related topics to layering that are quite worthwhile discussing. While thinking out loud what we would talk about I told Mario to better start recording because good ideas were popping out left and right. In the end this talk about "layering" included snippets on model generation, interaction models, architectural styles, process engines, SOA, state transfer, and (gasp!) Microsoft Access. Check it out.
Think that listening to layering is old news and everybody should know anyway? Well, look through some large business apps and see how well layered they are. Oops... so what happened? Who wrote all that crappy code that drags SQL data types into the UI layer? No one, of course. Maybe the janitor came in at night and did that... Right! (remember the Dilbert where the garbage man finds a mistake in Dilbert's math? When Dilbert asks him how come that he is a garbage man his response is that the real question is how come that Dilbert gets to be an engineer...). The fact is: bad code is not actually written but rather happens. Therefore, I think it rarely hurts to reinforce some of the well-known ideas and remind people of the nuances and motivations. So have a peek -- it is shorter than your typical soap opera episode. And no commercials...
Gregor is a cloud architect and author. He is a frequent speaker on asynchronous messaging,
IT strategy, and cloud.