bliki tagged by: application architecture
AnemicDomainModel
This is one of those anti-patterns that's been around for quite a long time, yet seems to be having a particular spurt at the moment. I was chatting with Eric Evans on this, and we've both noticed they seem to be getting more popular. As great boosters of a proper Domain Model, this is not a good thing.
25 November 2003
CQRS
CQRS stands for Command Query Responsibility Segregation. It's a pattern that I first heard described by Greg Young. At its heart is a simple notion that you can use a different model to update information than the model you use to read information. This simple notion leads to some profound consequences for the design of information systems.
14 July 2011
EagerReadDerivation
One of the interesting talks I attended at QCon San Francisco, was one given by Greg Young about a particular architecture he'd used on a recent system. Greg is a big fan of Domain Driven Design, in this case it needs to be used with a system that has to process a high transaction rate and provide data to lots of users. There were a number of things I found interesting about his design, particularly his use of Event Sourcing, but for this post I want to dwell on just one aspect - what I'll call Eager Read Derivation.
10 February 2009
EventPoster
This a style of application I've come across a couple of times. The application is primarily a reporting application that gives users real time information about the state of something. It is an active application, in that the users have a lot of control about what kinds of things they are looking at they're able to drill down in particular areas and generally manipulate their display; however it is still, at least primarily a read-only application.
30 December 2005
FixedLengthString
Look at most libraries that talk between application programming languages and relational databases, and you'll notice that they map the string type in the database (char or varchar) to a string type in the programming language. Simple, obvious, but perhaps it's wrong.
11 August 2003
LayeringPrinciples
For the last few days I've been attending a workshop on enterprise software in Norway, hosted by Jimmy Nilsson. During the workshop we had a session where we came up and voted on a bunch of design principles.
7 January 2005
PresentationDomainSeparation
One of the most useful design principles that I've found and followed is that of keeping a good separation between the presentation aspects of a program (the user interface) and the rest of the functionality. Over the years where I've seen this done, I've seen plenty of benefits:
ReportingDatabase
If I'm using a domain model, how do I support ad hoc SQL queries?
2 April 2004
ResourcePool
Many programs need to make use of resources that are expensive to create and maintain. Examples of these are database connections and threads. A resource pool provides a good way to manage these resources.
29 March 2011
StranglerApplication
When Cindy and I went to Australia, we spent some time in the rain forests on the Queensland coast. One of the natural wonders of this area are the huge strangler vines. They seed in the upper branches of a fig tree and gradually work their way down the tree until they root in the soil. Over many years they grow into fantastic and beautiful shapes, meanwhile strangling and killing the tree that was their host.
29 June 2004
Transactionless
A couple of years ago I was talking to a couple of friends of mine who were doing some work at eBay. It's always interesting to hear about the techniques people use on high volume sites, but perhaps one of the most interesting tidbits was that eBay mostly hardly ever uses database transactions.
18 March 2007
ApplicationBoundary
How do you define the boundary of an application?
ContextualValidation
In my writing endeavors, I've long intended to write a chunk of material on validation. It's an area that leads to a lot of confusion and it would be good to get some solid description of some of the techniques that work well. However life is full of things to write about, rather more than time allows.
7 December 2005
EnterpriseArchitecture
Just recently I've picked up a couple of bad reviews on Amazon for P of EAA because there is nothing in the book about enterprise architecture. Of course there's a good reason for that - the book is about enterprise application architecture, that is how to design enterprise applications. Enterprise architecture is a different topic, how to organize multiple applications in an enterprise into a coherent whole.
9 October 2003
FirstLaw
My First Law of Distributed Object Design: Don't distribute your objects (From P of EAA).
InversionOfControl
Inversion of Control is a common phenomenon that you come across when extending frameworks. Indeed it's often seen as a defining characteristic of a framework.
26 June 2005
LocalDTO
If you've been keeping an eye on my fellow ThoughtBloggers you'll know that it seems one of my fowlbots has blown a fuse, the Australian sun obviously frizzles these Swedish models.
Jon's annoyed with Data Transfer Objects, but it's not that DTOs are a bad thing, just like any pattern they are useful in a certain context. Patterns always have two parts: the how and the when. Not just do you need to know how to implement them, you also have to know when to use them and when to leave them alone.
21 October 2004
PublishedInterface
Published Interface is a term I used (first in Refactoring) to refer to a class interface that's used outside the code base that it's defined in. As such it means more than public in Java and indeed even more than a non-internal public in C#. I've argued that the distinction between published and public is actually more important than that between public and private.
26 December 2003
RequestStreamMap
Hang around my colleagues at ThoughtWorks and you soon get the impression that the only good Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is a dead ESB. Jim Webber refers to them as Egregious Spaghetti Boxes. So it's not uncommon to hear tales of attempts to get them out of systems that don't need them.
1 July 2009
StaticSubstitution
As I listen to our development teams talk about their work, one common theme is their dislike of things held in statics. Typically we see common services or components held in static variables with static initializers. One of the big problems with statics (in most languages) is you can't use polymorphism to substitute one implementation with another. This bits us a lot because we are great fans of testing - and to test well it's important to be able to replace services with a Service Stub.
20 October 2004
SunkCostDrivenArchitecture
I find this to be a sadly common architectural style. Your company buys some very expensive piece of infrastructure software. You are then told you must use it on a project even if it's not suitable for the project and causes you extra effort. After paying all that money for it you don't want it to go to waste do you?
14 June 2004
UiPatternsReadings
In the summer of 2006 I did a major chunk of work on UI patterns. Since then they've been very much on ice as my primary writing focus has shifted (although not very visibly) to DomainSpecificLanguages. On this page I'll keep a note of links to writings I've liked that are connected with that work.
12 July 2007