Comment by sodapopcan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sodapopcan | Hacker News Reader

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Along the lines of what OP is talking about, part of the problem is that Rails has no service objects, so I have seen a handful of different ideas of what they mean (probably no more than 10).

The one I've seen he most is stuff like `UserRegistrationService` or the like. These things can end up getting scattered and in general, I would rather just talk to the business object, ie, `User.register` which can delegate to a more complex private object handling it. It's basically "inverting" things. The win here is that things are more discoverable (You can look at the user object and see a list of everything it does) and more importantly draws better boundaries. This way the web layer only has to know about `User` instead of `RegisterUserService` and `DeleteUserService` etc.

Again, services can work and aren't inherently bad, but plain MVC can certainly also work.

I feel like the same people that like UserRegistrationService will argue that database table names should be plural because it reads better, which is wrong for similar reasons.

I don’t really follow. My focus wasn’t on the naming but the location of responsibilities.

I understood. Perhaps my mental connection was somewhat flimsy though. I was trying to make a tongue-in-cheek joke about how whenever I work on a database that has tables with overloaded responsibilities (poor normalization) instead of proper foreign keys they often also coincidentally have poor, plural names. Whenever I encounter such a thing, I think about the story of how it became that way. Usually part of the story includes a developer looking for a place to stick some logic and deciding an arbitrary place seems good enough because it’s a bit vague.

How are plural names linked to those things, though? I have a low-care level for naming conventions so long as there are conventions. Many successful frameworks use plural tables names. Though I agree singular probably makes a little more sense, especially since it eliminates the need for inflection code.

Your UserRegistrationService(s) is/are also prone to be overloaded. You don’t think of that as part of a naming convention? Would you argue that’s more about architecture? I was simultaneously agreeing with you and adding that this other minor organizational annoyance I have adds to the pile. Apologies if that seems low value.

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