Beautiful Architecture
Book Description
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
