Beautiful Architecture

What are the ingredients of robust, elegant, flexible, and maintainable software architecture? "Beautiful Architecture" seeks to answer this question with a collection of intriguing essays from more than a dozen of today's leading software designers and architects. In each essay, one or two contributors present a favorite piece of software architecture, and analyze what makes it innovative and ideal for its purpose. Some of the engineers in this book reveal how they developed a specific project, including the decisions they faced and the trade offs they made, while others take a step back to investigate the impact certain architectural aspects have had on computing as a whole.Topics include: Facebook's architecture as the basis for a data-centric application ecosystem; The magic behind the Jikes RVM self-optimizable, self-hosting runtime for a high-level language; Differences and similarities between object-oriented and functional architectural analysis; How architectures can affect system evolution and developer engagement; The effect of Xen's well-designed architecture on the way operating systems evolve; Design choices and building blocks that made Tandem the platform of choice in high-availability environments for over two decades; How creeping featurism has helped GNU Emacs gain unanticipated functionality; and, How community processes can help software architectures evolve from rough sketches to beautiful systems. Go behind the scenes to learn what it takes to design elegant software architecture, and how it can shape the way you approach your own projects, with "Beautiful Architecture".

ISBN 059651798X   Pages 404 ISBN13 9780596517984 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher O'Reilly Media, Inc, USA   Weight (grammes) 680 Imprint O'Reilly Media, Inc, USA   Published in Sebastopol Format Paperback   Height (mm) 232 Publication date 06 Feb 2009   Width (mm) 178 Library of Congress QA76.76   Spine width (mm) 25 DEWEY 005.12   Academic level Professional / Scholarly DEWEY edition DC22

		Foreword by Stephen J. Mellor
Pt. 1		On Architecture
1		What is Architecture? by John Klein and David Weiss		3
2		A Tale of Two Systems: A Modern-Day Software Fable by Pete Goodliffe		25
Pt. 2		Enterprise Application Architecture
3		Architecting For Scale by Jim Waldo		45
4		Making Memories by Michael Nygard		63
5		Resource-Oriented Architectures: Being "In the Web" by Brian Sletten		89
6		Data Grows Up: The Architecture of the Facebook Platform by Dave Fetterman		111
Pt. 3		Systems Architecture
7		Xen and the Beauty of Virtualization by Derek Murray and Keir Fraser		155
8		Guardian: A Fault-Tolerant Operating System Environment by Greg Lehey		175
9		JPC: An X86 PC Emulator in Pure Java by Rhys Newman and Christopher Dennis		199
10		The Strength of Metacircular Virtual Machines: Jikes RVM by Ian Rogers and Dave Grove		235
Pt. 4		End-User Application Architectures
11		GNU Emacs: Creeping Featurism is A Strength by Jim Blandy		263
12		When the Bazaar Sets Out To Build Cathedrals by Till Adam and Mirko Boehm		279
Pt. 5		Languages and Architecture
13		Software Architecture: Object-Oriented Versus Functional by Bertrand Meyer		315
14		Rereading the Classics by Panagiotis Louridas		349
		Afterword by William J. Mitchell		383
		Index		393

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