(Apologies to Christopher Alexander)

Christopher Alexander, the architect who inspired the Design Patterns movement, wrote a two part article that appeared in the April and May 1965 issues of Architectural Forum entitled “The City is Not a Tree.” The tree in the title is not a biological tree, but refers to a hierarchy being used as a way to organize how modern cities are built.

We all try to organize the world into neat categories. It helps us make sense of the world. Unfortunately, those categories and subcategories force us to view the world as a set of hierarchical categories. Alexander argued that architects who think that way produce buildings and cities that are sterile and unlivable. For example, zoning that refuses to mix residential, industrial and commercial use has some very severe drawbacks in transportation, living conditions, and tax policy.

The world has too many interrelationships to be viewed as a hierarchy, it is really a semi-lattice. Now there are parts of the world that are hierarchies. But a hierarchy is a semi-lattice, but the reverse is not true. The point is that if you view the world as a hierarchy you miss the true picture.

Software often has to model some part of the world. The World Wide Web is a semi-lattice. Image what the Web would be like if it could only be structured as a hierarchical directory such as Yahoo. Don’t get me wrong; neat categories are often useful. But Search has become such an important part of the Web because it allows you to capture the relationships in a semi-lattice.

Take the classic example I used to give my software engineering students when teaching them about abstraction and object-oriented systems: How do you define a chair? Of course they start out with a standard definition. A chair has a back, a seat, and four legs. But what about a bean bag? Or even a table? In the end, what emerges is that a chair is about a relationship between a piece of anatomy and surface that can support it.It is a relationship, not an object with constraints.

This is what led Alexander to focus on patterns and not components. Of course, some patterns could become components. But components (software or otherwise) are packaging artifacts, not fundamental abstractions. This is why the authors of Design Patterns have the principle of "Favor object composition over class inheritance." Class inheritance is a hierarchy. Object composition allows you to build a semi-lattice if that is appropriate.

Focusing on relationships means you focus on behavior, on what happens in the real world. Systems built on behavior are more flexible and more scalable than those based on constrained objects. Of course not all systems have to be flexible and scalable. Flexible and scalable often conflict with other desired goals such as performance.

Service orientation is based on focusing on the relationships or behaviors between the capabilities of distributed services because ultimately, a service performs some action in the real world. In service oriented systems you do not focus on constrained objects. You try to model the world as the semi-lattice it really is. 1

[1] Look at http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/simon.html for another interesting perspective.