Agree, this is going in the same direction. How models and data stores are structured will always depend on the particular application. But your point of "channeling access to the data store through only discrete paths" is very like the "separating communication logic from business logic" that I argue for.
However, I would like to take it further. Even if you move the data store access into a separate API layer, that API is still written in an imperative language, which limits the transformations that a framework can perform on it. I dream of a fully declarative way of specifying the communication dependencies, which would open up completely new processing modes, such as running all the business logic in Hadoop.
However, I would like to take it further. Even if you move the data store access into a separate API layer, that API is still written in an imperative language, which limits the transformations that a framework can perform on it. I dream of a fully declarative way of specifying the communication dependencies, which would open up completely new processing modes, such as running all the business logic in Hadoop.