Hexagonal architecture

The site seems to be down at the moment, but it's not about the use of hexagons in buildings (as I thought), but about a software design pattern. To quote:

Intent: Allow an application to equally be driven by users, programs, automated test or batch scripts, and to be developed and tested in isolation from its eventual run-time devices and databases.

Alternate description of the pattern plus comments: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?HexagonalArchitecture

It's a neat architecture and I use at least the ideas of it all the time, but the name has always struck me as weird, because as the author says [1] it's just arbitrary. Seems like "port-based" or "microkernal-like" or something would be better.

[1]: http://fideloper.com/hexagonal-architecture , see "Why A Hexagon"

Huge fan of this architecture, and have implemented several successful systems using ideas from this and Robert Martin's Clean Architecture. A subscription service, a payment processing service, and simple service that allowed soundcloud users to trade follows for free downloads. In the beginning it starts out feeling over-engineered, but the flexibility gained in the medium to long term quickly makes up for this.

I did work on an architecture that borrowed from hexagonal architecture and Robert Martin's clean architecture. I called it Obvious http://retromocha.com/obvious/

The ideas sound nice, but whenever I've seen actual code that says it's been based on hexagonal architecture.... it's been an over-engineered difficult-to-work-with mess.

Yeah this was a thing in the laravel community last year when the leaders went through their PoEA phase.

It's largely passed now and CQRS has as well, its fun to watch though.

This was one of the first things that was shown to me at my first job. It strengthened my tendency toward well-defined, modular architectures.