Objectives

What are we doing here?

Talking about architecture

More importantly, practicing it

Meaning, making sure YOU practice it

From RFP through review

No prior architectural experience required

Architecture

What do we expect of a "good" architecture?

the "ities": Integrity, Simplicity, Reliability, Extensibility, Maintainability, Modularity, Recoverability, Composability, Parsimony, Scalability, Security, Performability, Longevity, and so on...

make it easy for developers to make "right" decisions (where "right" => "right for this project or system")

in other words, enable "correctness by default"

or, rather, have developers using our architecture "fall naturally into the pit of success"

Intended Use

The Point

NOT as a "pick from column A, pick from column B"

NOT a "you must have one of each of these"

Instead, this is just a scaffold/structure

a way to frame some thoughts

a way to help constrain some thoughts

a starting point for approaching a project

Please season to taste/suit your own needs

Catalog

Architectural Elements

Communication/Distribution

Presentation/Interaction

State Management

Processing

Resource Management

Tools

Catalog

Communication/Distribution

Transport

Over what medium does the communication travel?

Examples: TCP, UDP, ICMP, HTTP, named pipes, filesystem, queues, and more ...

Exchange

How do we interact?

Examples: request/response, solicit-notify, async, fire-and-forget, and more ...

Format

In what format does the data travel?

Examples: XML, code, text, JSON, raw binary, serialized objects, and more ...

Catalog

Presentation/Interaction

style

Graphical

Console

None

implementation

Markup (HTML, Acrobat)

Code (WinForms, native, etc)

perspectives

User, Administrative, Reported, ...

composite

Aggregates multiple applications into one

Based around a single style

Catalog

State Management

Durable vs. Transient State

state held across processing steps vs...

state held during processing

Relational vs. Object vs. Hierarchical vs ...

what is the "shape" of the data?

note that NoSQL databases add a lot more shapes...-- document, graph, key-value, ...

Context-based vs. Process-based state

where is the transient state held?

Catalog

Processing

Implementation

Procedural/Imperative

Classes/Objects

Declarative

Functional

Rules

Meta-object/Meta-programmatic

Transactional

Concurrent/Parallel (SISD, SIMD, MISD, MIMD)

Divide and Conquer

Recursive Data

Pipeline/Pipes-and-Filters

Event-based Coordination

Master/Slave, Fork/Join

Shared Data

Shared Queue

Catalog

Resource Management

Locator/Registry

Discovery

Injected

A priori Knowledge

Catalog

Tools

General-purpose Languages

Strongly-typed: C#, Java, C++, C, Pascal, ...

Weakly-typed: Smalltalk, Jscript, Ruby, ...

Problem-specific Languages

SQL, XQuery, XPath, XSLT, sed, awk, grep, VBA, games, Workflow, ...

Code manipulation tools

IDEs, instrumentation, static analysis, debugger, ...

Software Factories & DSLs

Code generators

Libraries/Frameworks

Data formats

XAML, XUL, HTML, resource files, ...

Documentation

Exercises

Kata: a series of moves, as in martial arts, designed to give the student an opportunity to practice more than just an individual movement

Coding Kata: a small challenge or problem designed to give the programming student an opportunity to practice more than just "Hello World"

Architectural Kata: a small project designed to give the architectural student an opportunity to practice more than just a coding kata

Exercises

Architectural Katas

Step One: assemble your team

Step Two: visit http://www.architecturalkatas.com

Step Three: When you are ready, click the big blue button

Exercises

Talking points/starting points

what is the principal "-ity" of the project, in tech terms?

who are your users? administrators? Stakeholders?

where are the "big rocks"? where will the major complexities come from?

what technological risks is your architecture taking?

what does the cost structure look like, both up-front and on a periodic basis?

what will the software designs look like? what software packages will you be using?

Credentials

Who is this guy?

Architect, Engineering Manager/Leader, "force multiplier"

Principal -- Neward & Associates

http://www.newardassociates.com

Educative (http://educative.io) Author

Performance Management for Engineering Managers

Author

Professional F# 2.0 (w/Erickson, et al; Wrox, 2010)

Effective Enterprise Java (Addison-Wesley, 2004)

SSCLI Essentials (w/Stutz, et al; OReilly, 2003)

Server-Based Java Programming (Manning, 2000)