Through The Looking Glass Architecture Antipattern

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An anti-pattern is a commonly recurring software design pattern that is ineffective or counterproductive. One architectural anti-pattern I've seen a number of times is something I'll call the "Through the Looking Glass" pattern. It's named so because APIs and internal representations are often reflected and defined by their consumers.

The core of this pattern is that the software components are split in a manner that couples multiple components in an inappropriate manner. An example is software that is split between a "front end" and a "back end", but they both use the same interfaces and/or value objects to do their work. This causes a situation where almost every back end change requires a front-end change and visa versa. As particularly painful examples, think of using GWT (in general) or trying to use SOAP APIs through javascript.

There are a number of other ways this pattern can show up... most often it can be a team structure problem. Folks will be split by their technical expertise, but then impede progress because the DBA's who are required to make database changes are not aware of what the front end application needs so the front end developers end up spend a large amount of time "remote controlling" the database team. It can also be a situation where there is a desire for a set of web service APIs are exposed for front end applications, but because the back-end service calls are only in existence for the front end application, there end up being a number of chicken and egg situations.

In almost every case, the solution to this problem is to either #1 add a translation layer, #2 #1 simplify the design, or #3 restructure the work such that it can be isolated on a component by component basis. In the web service example above, it's probably more appropriate to use direct integration for the front end and expose web services AFTER the front end work has been done. For the database problem, the DBA probably should be embedded with the front-end developer and "help" with screen design so that they have a more complete understanding of what is going on. An alternate solution to the database problem might be to allow the front end developer to build the initial database (if they have the expertise) and allow the DBA to tune the design afterwords.

I find that it's most often easiest and most economical to add a translation layer between layers than trying to unify the design unless the solution space can be clearly limited in scope and scale. I say this because modern rapid development frameworks ([g]rails, play...) now support this in a very simple manner and there is no great reason to NOT do it...except maybe ignorance.

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