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Overview
What are the ingredients of robust, elegant, flexible, and maintainable software architecture? Beautiful Architecture answers this question through a collection of intriguing essays from more than a dozen of today's leading software designers and architects. In each essay, contributors present a notable 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 decisions they faced and tradeoffs they made. Others take a step back to investigate how certain architectural aspects have influenced computing as a whole. With this book, you'll discover:
- How Facebook's architecture is the basis for a data-centric application ecosystem
- The effect of Xen's well-designed architecture on the way operating systems evolve
- How community processes within the KDE project help software architectures evolve from rough sketches to beautiful systems
- How creeping featurism has helped GNU Emacs gain unanticipated functionality
- The magic behind the Jikes RVM self-optimizable, self-hosting runtime
- Design choices and building blocks that made Tandem the choice platform in high-availability environments for over two decades
- Differences and similarities between object-oriented and functional architectural views
- How architectures can affect the software's evolution and the developers' engagement
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.
Synopsis
Many books present architectures, but few ever talk about how they came to be. This book will address the question of what are the ingredients of a robust, elegant, flexible, maintainable architecture? Beautiful Architecture will let readers eavesdrop on some of the best minds in software engineering today. In each chapter, a well-known software engineer will present one of his or her favorite pieces of architecture, then explain what makes that architecture particularly elegant, robust, clever, and fit for its purpose—in other words, beautiful. In Beautiful Architecture, thirty master architects think aloud as they work through their project's architecture, outlining the decisions made and the tradeoffs encountered. Instead of simply providing the answer in the form of presenting architecture, this book takes a look behind the scenes - by sharing the decisions behind the architecture.