Re: The wisdom of the object mentors (Was: Searching OO Associations with RDBMS Persistence Models)

Christian Brunschen wrote:
> In article <LUKfg.16278$A26.376787_at_ursa-nb00s0.nbnet.nb.ca>,
> Bob Badour <bbadour_at_pei.sympatico.ca> wrote:
>
> People build higher-level abstractions on top of lover-level ones all the
> time. I fail to see what problem you are having?

You are using the term "higher-level" to mean "present at a higher layer in the architecture." The interfaces you describe and label "higher-level" are actually *lower* level interfaces. That is where the difficulty arises.

> I advocate using the proper tools for the job, using the most appropriate
> level of abstraction, keeping separate parts of the system separate (and
> potentially pluggable).

While that makes sense on the surface, and often works, it breaks down when one is trying to make pluggable two things with wildly different levels of abstraction. Often, the response of programmers is to throw away functionality for the higher-level one.

So, for example, if someone advocates that one build an interface, (at a lower level of abstraction,) which will allow one to swap out an RDBMS for a flat file, one can immediately conclude that that someone doesn't understand the proper use and role of an RDBMS.

Marshall Received on Fri Jun 02 2006 - 16:37:56 CEST