Exploration Through Example

Example-driven development, Agile testing, context-driven testing, Agile programming, Ruby, and other things of interest to Brian Marick

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Tue, 13 Dec 2005

Convention over configuration workbook?

Item: I'm fond of Bill Wake's Refactoring Workbook because it shows lots of examples of refactorings in action.

Item: Rails is hot, hot, hot these days.

Item: One reason it's popular is convention over configuration, which...

... places ease of use for the majority of situations ahead of the need to provide maximum flexibility for the few. The way this is done is through the adoption of coding conventions that automatically embed a certain amount of configuration right into the framework. Convention makes certain assumptions about how things will be put together and by making these assumptions implicit in the code it frees the framework from the burden of having to spell out every intention through explicit configuration. The conventions can be overridden to handle cases where the convention might not be optimal but speed and ease of use are the big benefit that comes from adopting them.

Item: Berin Loritsch says:

Java applications can be developed using [convention over configuration], but often aren't. The problems come into play when the framework you are using works against you. Other times its just too difficult to do right. You will have to resort to reflection and other black magic tricks.

Item: Better Software has had an author drop out. Three times before when that's happened, I've quickly written a replacement article. Two of them have worked out rather well, I think. (You can see them on the sidebar: "Behind the Screens" and "Bypassing the GUI".)

Therefore, I'm thinking of writing an article on convention over configuration in Java-style languages. (Despite the chain of thought implied here, the idea was really Mike Cohn's.) The problem is, I don't have any personal experience to draw on. Do you have examples that would let me produce an article with something of the flavor or Wake's book? If so, you know how to reach me.

## Posted at 07:19 in category /misc [permalink] [top]