Beautiful Architecture

Architecture Facets

Reducing the structure of a multidimensional, dynamic system into a linear narrative form is always a challenge, whether we are communicating our vision of a system that doesn’t exist or trying to explain the interacting parts of one that we’ve already built. Hypertext might make it easier to approach the elephant from several perspectives, but paper doesn’t yet support hyperlinks very well.

As we look at each of these facets, keep in mind that they are different ways of looking at the overall system. For instance, we used a modular architecture to support different deployment scenarios. At the same time, each module is built in a layered architecture. These are orthogonal but intersecting concerns. Each set of modules follows the same layering, and each layer is found across all the modules.

Indeed, we all felt deeply gratified that we were able to keep these concerns separated while still making them mutually supportive.

Modules and Launcher

All along, we were thinking “product family” rather than “application” because we had to support several different deployment scenarios with the same underlying code. In particular, we knew from the beginning that we would have the following configurations:

Studio Client

A studio has between two and four of these workstations. The photographers use them for the entire workflow, from loading images through to creating the orders.

Studio Server

The central server inside each studio runs MySQL for structured data such as customers ...