Fancy Bread

While cleaning out the office recently, I ran across a couple of textbooks I kept from my business school courses. I didn't care much for business school, but I did learn some valuable concepts. A few of which came from a course on Organizational Behaviour (OB). OB is a "management science" which can be briefly described as the study of groups in organizations. A goal of OB is to determine the best strategy to use within an organization to maximize employee performance (productivity) and, as a result, profitability. If you think of an organization with managers and employees, where each employee performs specific duties, you might find it strange to have a manager for every employee. You rarely see this in the real world, because it is grossly inefficient.

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I have really enjoyed reading the perspectives on application architecture that have sprouted up on the mailing lists lately. It comes a at good time for me, since I'm beginning my first fully OO MVC project. One of the best recommendations, I feel, is to keep your controllers as dumb as possible. While this is a fine aspiration, there are plug-ins and convenience methods available to frameworks that just make life easier. In particular, the availability of "beaner" methods. I'm currently using Model-Glue, so I'll use the makeEventBean() method as an example. MakeEventBean() is really useful for populating a bean with any setter methods that match the keys in the Model-Glue event. While convenient, I think it provides a slippery slope for business logic to slide into controller methods.

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