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Why The Walled Garden and Prairie

This Chautauqua is a series on what is generally seen as two major incompatible views on how to design, implement and operate information systems. The aim is to explore how both general approaches make sense in different ways and in combination rather than in antagonism. In choosing Walled Garden and Prairie to categorise these two general approaches it might seem that I have a negative bias to one or the other, that really isn't where this is coming from. Walled Garden is often treated as a derogatory term, with hard perimeters, command and control hierarchies and long term planning but its also (in its original use) about providing the right conditions for different plants with different requirements and a structured navigation which allows maintenance, gardening without obstructing or affecting the rest of the Garden. In its way the Prairie might seem without controls, borders, vulnerable and inefficient but it's also resilient because there is no single point of failure and burning it down periodically keeps it healthy. If you want to think of these two views as being 'Enterprise Architecture' on the one hand and 'Startup Scrum like Good Enough for Now' on the other then that's fine so long as you also think about how each view can inform and be integrated into the other. Its that I'd like to describe. The Chautauqua will meander through the current practices and arguments using this metaphor. They're abstractions and like all abstractions leaky. But we won't worry about that the metaphor will stay useful.

Walls and Trust Nothing

At its simplest level the most obvious feature of the Walled Garden is the Wall. Walls have all sorts of connotations for us, especially at this moment in history, and they begin with protection by exclusion. Being surrounded by a wall gives us a feeling of security and control over who or what can gain access inside and control as to what and who leaves. In its original use for a real garden the wall was much more about protection, shelter and providing the right environment for the plants and crops. The surrounding wall warms in the sun and raises the ambient temperature for plants in the north of the garden, it provides shelter from prevailing and strong winds and it organises the land separating it for management. Do the walls around our information systems share similar nurturing properties? Yes. You can make a case that treating the Wall as an interface, or inversely interfaces as walls lets the code within those walls consume and provide services and information specific to those interfaces (or walls). So this takes the metaphor of the Wall to mean more than just an infrastructure and Enterprise defining concept. We'll get onto that soon.

Interfaces All The Way Down

A common habit when coding a new service, or class object with methods is to postpone actually writing the code that does the thing by adding another layer. The initial impetus to this is Good, abstract the detail from the caller, use the interface to be able to flex what the code does and so on. Often though it becomes a kind of procrastination; oh this layer isn't quite right, I need to orchestrate some dependency and filter what happens depending upon some logic that really doesn't belong at this level. And one of the ways out of that conundrum is to make another layer (or in some languages have a friend class).