Tags: software architecture June 30, 2008    

I wrote this post on April 8th 2008 and put it on my aeonity blog, which has disappeared for whatever reason. I didn't put this post on my current blog right away because I wanted to reflect on what I wrote. After some reflection, I've decided to put this post on my blog again.

I've been reading Rainwater's "Herding Cats", which is a good read, and gotten annoyed at reading about architectures again. Maybe this is a good point to start writing poetry. The following is titled "What a waste".

Ah, software architecture.

So many papers published,

so many views proposed.

And all I see are three tier,

blackboard, pipes 'n' filters, and peer-to-peer.

Just pick one to your taste.

What a waste.

Many people will probably disagree with me, especially if they define architecture very broadly. I do realize that there are more architectures and that having the right architecture is important. However, there seem to be only a few main architectures. Once the right requirements information is obtained, choosing one of them cannot be that difficult.

In case someone is wondering what herding cats had to do with software architecture, the rest of the book's title is "A Primer for Programmers Who Lead Programmers". The description in the book of how to handle creating an architecture is pretty good, namely to figure out what to do and then create a little prototype to see how well the architecture fits the software being created. Instead of saying that knowing state of the art architecture research is very important, I would have preferred that the book listed the main architectures and said that knowing how to describe them is important.

Copyright © 2008 Borys Bradel. All rights reserved. This post is only my possibly incorrect opinion.