https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Inner-Platform_Effect

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[bcf19c66c4]

The Inner-Platform Effect

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2006-04-21 Edit
[apx-square] Alex Papadimoulis

Founder, The Daily WTF

I'm sure that a lot of you have may heard about "antipatterns."
They're more or less the converse of "software design patterns" in
that they describe a frequently repeated problem in designing a
commonly-occurring solution. I've observed quite of a few of these
antipatterns in the real world, but noticed that one particularly
egregious (though, thankfully, rare) antipattern wasn't documented: I
call it the Inner-Platform Effect.

The Inner-Platform Effect is a result of designing a system to be so
customizable that it ends becoming a poor replica of the platform it
was designed with. This "customization" of this dynamic
inner-platform becomes so complicated that only a programmer (and not
the end user) is able to modify it.

This Inner-Platform Effect has been seen here before (most recently
in the Enterprise Rules Engine), but it wasn't until I read Mario's
submission that I thought it was time to name and identify the
antipattern.

The loan-origination system that Mario was dragged into was designed
to be revolutionary: instead of relying on a programmer to make
changes to the database, a user would simply need to make a few
changes via the "Data Structure Modeler." I'll try to give you an
idea of exactly how this ultra-dynamic storage system worked by
showing a few snippets of code from the DSM:

    cmd.CommandText = "SELECT * FROM tblTable WHERE Name = '" + tableName + "'";

    ...

    cmd.CommandText = "UPDATE tblFields SET DataType = '" + newDataType + "' "
                     + " WHERE fieldId = " + fieldId.ToString();

    ...

    cmd.CommandText = "SELECT fieldValueId, dataValue FROM tblFieldValues "
                    + " WHERE fieldId = " + fieldId.ToString()
                    + " ORDER BY defaultOrder";

As you may have gathered, the DSM organized data using a structure it
called a "Table". These tables had one or more Fields, with each
Field having a specific "DataType". A single datum was then stored as
a FieldValue. All of these were stored inside of a relational
database.

Ironically, Mario was brought into the system because the client
wanted to add a new Field to a form.

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