Ats System Metaphor

Part of AtsGoesExtreme and the AtsDiary. See also SystemMetaphor.

Initially, I wasn't satisfied with the AtsSystemMetaphor. We had trouble coming up with one, and "settled" -- or so we thought -- for a warehouse metaphor:

ATS is like a bunch of warehouses. Users pull objects out of warehouses, change them, and then put them back into warehouses.

We chose that metaphor because we had already been instinctively using it to describe the classes that mediated between our objects and the database.

As I said, I was initially unhappy with the metaphor. Now that I look at it some more, though, I'm realizing that it's quite apt. ATS doesn't have any real BusinessRules; all it ever does is pull data out of the database, present it to the user with a nice interface, and then save the changes back into the database. There's some relationships between objects and there's some security, but the warehouse metaphor does a nice job of covering the basic innards of the system.

At this point, I'm not sure if the SystemMetaphor is supposed to describe the internals of the system, or the user's view of the system. I'm guessing it's supposed to convey the overall architecture of the system (i.e., internals), so in that case the AtsSystemMetaphor seems to be about right to me.

CategoryMetaphor