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

Part II. A Story

Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The second part of this book tells a pattern story: we describe how a real-world process control system for warehouse management was designed with our pattern language for distributed computing. The story focuses on three areas of this software system: its baseline architecture, its communication middleware, and the representation of warehouse topology.

Using an example from the real world, we illustrate how a software architecture can be designed systematically with help of patterns. Step by step we unfold the vision of this architecture. We start with the fundamental baseline architecture, then look inside the system's communication middleware, and end by detailing the subsystem that represents the warehouse storage topology.

Our goal with this part is, however, not only to present an illustrative example of the use of the pattern language for distributed systems that we present in Part III. We also want to demonstrate that patterns and pattern languages in general are a powerful tool for developing software architectures on the basis of thoughtful and explicit design decisions and considerations, so that the resulting software systems can fulfill their required functional, operational, and developmental qualities.

The chapters in this part are structured as follows:

• Chapter 4, Warehouse Management Process Control, briefly introduces ...