Boundaries Are Explicit Because Iteration Kills

Growing up with C++, I’ve always expected software to have a strong domain model. If I had grown up with ADO Recordsets or ADO.NET DataSets, perhaps I’d have a different perspective on software, but my initial reaction to the Recordset was bewilderment at an object chocked full of data and no behaviors. I can see both sides of the coin now, and I think both approaches have their advantages in different scenarios. I still prefer the domain model. I do wonder how these models will evolve over the next few years as technologies like DLINQ arrive and continue the push towards abstracting away the database as a minor detail.

Here is some code that works wonderfully well.

Well, the code works wonderfully well as long as SomeOtherObject is in the same process. As soon as SomeOtherObject becomes a proxy to a remote object, end-users feel the pain of an O(N²) operation carried out by traversing protocol stacks, security boundaries, and network routers. Thus, the SOA tenet arose that boundaries are explicit, and location transparency is a pipedream.

If boundaries are explicit, perhaps database boundaries should be explicit as well. Even though database servers are typically on our side of the firewall, if SomeObject.UpdateValue() is a database roundtrip, the application performance is in a world of hurt.

I’m wondering how to avoid this problem before an application gets into load testing. Static code analysis? Perhaps require the method to be invoked with a different operator? (SomeObject->UpdateValue())? I think -> is a nice indication that the call could possible travel out of process….

Perhaps I'm thinking crazy, or perhaps some dark part of me misses C++ syntax.