This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Java Buzz by Michael Cote. Original Post: The Burger: Search-and-Replace Development and Strategy Feed Title: Cote's Weblog: Coding, Austin, etc. Feed URL: https://cote.io/feed/ Feed Description: Using Java to get to the ideal state. Latest Java Buzz Posts Latest Java Buzz Posts by Michael Cote Latest Posts From Cote's Weblog: Coding, Austin, etc.

One of my co-workers, Divakar, jokes around that he's "a firm believe in cut-and-paste." Whether you're writing code, specs, or a letter to the editor, someone else has done something similar, so cut-and-paste! I've suggested he could write a two part series around this, uh, "methodology,": (1.) Cut-and-Paste Programming, which would be the "beginner" book, and, (2.), Search and Replace Design Patterns, which would be the "advanced" book.

The diagram above, from Mercury (a competitor of my work) is a good example of some of the material from that second book. We call it "The Burger." Everyone uses The Burger. If pressed to make some sort of high-level architectural diagram for software, you use The Burger.

You choose one side of The Burger -- here, the bottom -- to be the dirty, nitty-gritty, guts stuff that The Customer doesn't want to deal with. The other side of The Burger -- here, the top -- to be all those nice things The Customer does want to deal with.

In this instance of The Burger, The Customer is a business person who (justifiably so) doesn't want to deal with thinking about all that crap at the bottom (computers, routers, databases, and other pieces of infrastructure). Instead they just thinking about their business processes. They don't want to know that some Oracle instance named CLEV-PO-34I9 has a slow response time, they want to know that sending purchase orders to the parts vendor are taking to long. Hell, even better, they don't want to deal with responding to the sluggish CLEV-PO-34I9 (someone in the meat or lettuce section does that), they just want to know that they need to plan to buy some beefier servers so that the slowness won't happen again.

So how does this related to the soon to be released Search-and-Replace Design Patterns? Well, you see, you can just search and replace all the text in The Burger to get a whole new architecture! I'd provide an example, but then you wouldn't have any reason to buy the book (oh, and I'd also have to think of a witty one). Instead, I'll again leave you with the following fine picture: