Little Architecture Huddle

" Martin Thompson and Michael Barker talk about building a HPC financial system handling over 100K tps at less than 1ms latency by having a new approach to infrastructure and software. Some of the tips include: understand the platform, model the domain, create a clear separation of concerns, choose data structures wisely, and run business logic on a single thread. "

"When people invent or improve significantly new services or technologies, they are in general focused on their domains (especially software vendors who are tempted to cater to their market first). Cloud computing is no exception. IBM, For example, defines the Rainmaker technology as software and hardware that work together to help enterprises create clouds. And, as usual, the devil lives in the details, and software and hardware will work together in a very proprietary way."

l

"Pretotyping [pree-tuh-tahy-ping], verb: Testing the initial appeal and actual usage of a potential new product by simulating its core experience with the smallest possible investment of time and money. Less formally, pretotyping is a way to test a product idea quickly and inexpensively by creating extremely simplified versions of that product to help validate the premise that "If we build it, they will use it.""

"There are some attractive Adobe Flash based solutions for this type of UI component, and while JavaScript versions exist (see this and this), the commercial Flash products tend to have better aesthetics and polish. To redress the balance in JavaScript's favour, I have created this jQuery carousel plugin."

"I'm passionate about Domain Driven Design (DDD). Like many experienced object modellers, I was practicing this long before Eric Evans coined that specific term, though I have sinced learned some useful specific patterns from his book. To me, DDD is about two things: focussing on the business functionality rather than on the technical implementation; and focussing on building a good model of the business domain rather than just on the specific immediate requirements. Like many others, I perceived that the key to this was to model the domain as behaviourally-complete domain objects: to actively resist the tendency to separate business functionality from the persistent domain entities."

"Just Enough Software Architecture book, by author George Fairbanks, focuses on a risk-driven approach to software architecture development. RelatedVendorContent Got fires in production? Find root cause in minutes. FREE Java performance tool The Agile Business Analyst Experience Java EE! 600 page Redbook Testing Platforms Analyst Comparison: IBM, Microsoft, Coverity, MKS, and more Transform IT Complexity to Achieve IT System Vitality George explains the Architecture Modeling process from different perspectives such as Engineering Use Models, Conceptual Model, Domain Model, Design Model and the Code Model. He also discusses the various architecture styles including Big ball of mud, Pipe-and-filter, Batch-sequential, Map-Reduce and talks about the distinction between architectural patterns and architectural styles. The discussion also includes topics like evolutionary design, architecture refactoring and how to analyze, test and validate the architecture models."

Cucumber lets software development teams describe how software should behave in plain text. The text is written in a business-readable domain-specific language and serves as documentation, automated tests and development-aid - all rolled into one format.

" In this interview from the Erlang Factory event in London, three creators of modern functional languages -- Martin Odersky, creator of Scala; Joe Armstrong, a creator of Erlang; and Don Syme, creator of F# -- discuss the similarities and differences of their creations. They also discuss their languages' common thread -- that they integrate object-oriented features in functional languages. "

" Dan North talks about the tendency developers-becoming-architects have to create bigger and more complex systems. Without trying to be simplistic, North argues for simplicity, offering strategies to extract the simple essence from complex situations. "

"After I graduated from the HIO Enschede (B.Sc level) in '94 I have worked with a lot of different platforms and environments: from 4GL's like System Builder, uniVerse and Magic to C++ on AIX to Java to Perl on Linux to C# on .NET. All these platforms and environments had one thing in common: their creators were convinced their platform was the best and greatest and easiest to write software with. To some extend, each and every one of them were decent platforms and it was perfectly possible to write software with them though I'll leave the classification whether they were / are the greatest and easiest to the reader. I'll try to make clear below why this dull intro is important. "

"If you have been following my blog, my company or my twitter page then you probably know that my startup - yonkly - was built with ASP.NET MVC. In this post, I will talk about how I scale deploy Yonkly very easily."

" Ian Robinson considers that programming for the web requires a different architectural approach than for applications: clients are interested only in URIs, clients are responsible for the integrity of a sequence of requests, and one should implement application protocols as protocol resources , not domain resources. "

" Sadek Drobi talks about abstracting the control syntax (glue), giving examples from mainstream and FP languages: Null, propagating errors, events, asynchronous programming, lists, streams, channels, functors, monads, and custom abstractions. "

"Agile development methods attempt to improve the software development process, so that we can deliver useful solutions more often, and more quickly. However, despite some successes larger organisations and projects have been very slow to adopt them. One of the reasons is that many agile methods are perceived as architecturally weak, disconnected from the realities of delivering large systems in complex enterprise environments."

"Fixed price contracts are evil - this is what can often be heard from agilists. On the other hand those contracts are reality which many agile teams have to face. But what if we try to tame it instead of fighting against it? How can a company execute this kind of contract using agile practices to achieve better results with lower risk? This article will try to answer those questions."

"Modern business relies on multitasking to get work done. Employees are evaluated on their ability to multitask. IT professionals are routinely assigned to multiple projects. Did we always do this? Does multitasking work? What are the real impacts of multitasking? Is there an alternative?"

" A number of commentators have been talking about the perceived dichotomy between Agile techniques and architectural thinking. In the Agile world architecture is often perceived as BDUF (Big Up Front Design) and as a result is frequently overlooked or delayed in the spirit of "YAGNI" (You ain't gonna need it)."

"The results of software estimation are important for stakeholders to take care of team allocation and budgeting. A widely prevalent technique to estimate in Agile has been Planning Poker, which is a consensus based. Does this way of estimating take too much time? Are there other methods which can be employed by experienced practitioners?"

"We can query an application's state to find out the current state of the world, and this answers many questions. However there are times when we don't just want to see where we are, we also want to know how we got there."