While lava is hot and deadly early on, it becomes hard to move once it cools down.  The is the thinking behind the name for the lava flow pattern.  This anti-pattern is one that occurs for more often than one would think and can be quite tricky to clean-up. Defining the Lava Flow Anti-Pattern There is nothing like a rant blog entry to give us a good definition for an anti-pattern. [Click Here to See The Page] “Successive, well intentioned, changes to architecture and technology throughout the lifetime of an application can lead to a fragmented and hard to maintain code base. Sometimes it is better to favour consistent legacy technology over fragmentation.“ In my experience, the most common trait... Read more

Best practices are like everything else.  There are times to ignore or break the rules.  The anti-pattern we cover in this episode results from not doing so.  The poltergeist anti-pattern occurs when we have a bunch of infrastructure code that serves the design but is otherwise useless.  When you are creating methods and classes solely as place-holders or pass-throughs, then you are feeding this anti-pattern. Defining the Poltergeist Anti-Pattern Once again, I found the best definition for our purposes in a blog article about anti-patterns. [Click Here to See The Page] “Useless classes with no real responsibility of their own, often used to just invoke methods in another class or add an unneeded layer of abstraction.“ You might think of... Read more