Rube Goldberg Machine

CategoryAntiPattern


Problem: Software components and interfaces are haphazardly glued together with the programmatic equivalent to duct-tape

Context: Multiple subsystems communicating with each other

Forces:

Supposed Solution: What Happens Next: Lessons Learned: Example:

The data comes in from a web form, is saved in a data base on the web server through a custom SQL-string as a BLOB (which is UUEncoded to be accepted in the field), then once every second hour, a cron job process these and purge the database from BLOBS, UUDecodes the BLOB, zips its contents and transfer it to another host using FTP, where it is unzipped, converted into a flat file and imported using a perl script into another target database where a trigger sets off the appropriate actions, splits the data and sorts it into different tables and eventually purges the data sent from the cron job from the temporary table where it arrived.

Links:

See Also:


See also: RubeGoldberg, BigBallOfMud


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