Beautiful Architecture: Leading Thinkers Reveal the Hidden Beauty in Software Design

Diomidis Spinellis · Georgios Gousios

Jan 2009 · "O'Reilly Media, Inc."

About this ebook

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.

Ratings and reviews

Easy to read and down to earth in most chapters. You should read this book if you are trying to find elegant solutions to problems addressed by Software Architectures. I think that no Software Engineers should venture on designing and writing Enterprise Software without reading this book. Supported by what the authors wrote I found gratifying the exercise of identifying the problem space and the strategies and software patterns that were used to solve such problems. I hope this book becomes a series that is updated every couple of years Software has an inner aesthetic that is directly related to its structure and the interactions of its parts, it can be enjoyed as music is. This book shows you why.

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