Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture: A Pattern Language for Distributed Computing, 4th Volume

Chapter 5. Baseline Architecture

There is at the back of every artist's mind, a pattern or type of architecture.

G.K. Chesterton, lone quote at the beginning of the Father Brown Mysteries Series of books.

This chapter tells the beginning of the pattern story: the specification of the baseline architecture for our warehouse management process control system. We outline how patterns helped to partition the system's core domain and infrastructure functionality, address distribution and concurrency concerns, and support users and other applications to access, or integrate with, its functionality. The result is the foundation for a product-line architecture: a structural backbone that captures the high-level aspects common to all configurations of the warehouse management process control system, and which also provides infrastructure and architectural measures for defining and handling the variations in specific instances of the system.

Architecture Context

Chapter 4, Warehouse Management Process Control, showed that warehouse management process control systems must provide a large set of integrated and effective administrative and operational domain functionality. The characteristics of this functionality, as well as the functionality set provided, can also differ between different instances of the system, depending on the capabilities of the IT environment into which these instances must be integrated. Realizing the domain functionality further requires an appropriate infrastructure, for ...