MVC and OOP, are we doing our best? - talk proposal

Here's my Euruko 2011 talk proposal which was rejected by the organizers. Let me know if the topic sounds interesting to you, I'd be happy to present it at some other conference.

Euruko 2011 talk proposal

It's a result of many years of my research/practice in OOP and MVC. The recent discovery of DCI can change a lot about the way we create MVC applications and Ruby is the best fit for DCI, in my opinion.


"MVC and OOP, are we doing our best?"

Ruby is one of the best OOP languages - are we using it the best way in our MVC applications? My observations show that there are common places where Ruby developers break the traditional OOP rules like the Law of Demeter or SOLID. It results in code of worse quality than it could be.

Early on, we agreed that we should move the logic from controllers into models. It's all fine, but most often it results in fat model classes. How to deal with the complexity?

We put everything into classes. DCI claims it's not OOP, it's class-oriented programming.

DCI (Data Context Interactions), a new architecture paradigm focuses more on object behavior and fits very well with Ruby MVC frameworks like Rails or Sinatra. I will talk about DCI and present some examples. DCI was invented by Trygve Reenskaug, the same scientists who formulated MVC. One of its main ideas is to inject roles to objects runtime (using mixins), thus making the base classes much thiner.

DCI brings some fresh air into the MVC architecture and solves many of the existing problems, like:
- fat model classes
- difficult reusability
- testing problems
- instead of one big object-oriented design we can deal with many small ones

This talk is based on several of my blog posts. Some of the ideas were already presented at SRUG and DRUG (Silesia and Lower Silesia Ruby User Groups) meetups. The blog posts and the talks triggered many interesting discussions.

http://andrzejonsoftware.blogspot.com/2008/07/mvc-how-to-write-controllers.html
http://andrzejonsoftware.blogspot.com/2010/05/rails-mvc-how-to-deal-with-fat-models.html
http://andrzejonsoftware.blogspot.com/2011/01/code-reuse-in-ruby-why-composition-is.html
http://andrzejonsoftware.blogspot.com/2011/02/dci-and-rails.html
http://andrzejonsoftware.blogspot.com/2011/02/application-or-set-of-resources.html

http://srug.pl/assets/andrzej-krzywda-rails-and-dci.txt



BIO

Andrzej Krzywda is the founder of Arkency, a Ruby on Rails shop (6 developers) based in Wroclaw, Poland. He also teaches Ruby on Rails at the University of Wroclaw. Andrzej has 11 years of IT experience. He has been involved in many different projects, including big telco, small startups, consulting companies etc. He worked with Java, .Net, Python, PHP but since 2004 he feels most comfortable with Ruby. Andrzej has presented at conferences like RuPy 2007, RuPy 2008, PyCon 2008, SFI 2006, SFI 2008, KKIO 2004 and lots of smaller meetups like DRUG or SRUG.
andrzejkrzywda@gmail.com