Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture

Introduction

In case you haven’t realized it, building computer systems is hard. As the complexity of the system gets greater, the task of building the software gets exponentially harder. As in any profession, we can progress only by learning, both from our mistakes and from our successes. This book represents some of this learning written in a form that I hope will help you to learn these lessons quicker than I did, or to communicate to others more effectively than I did before I boiled these patterns down.

In this introduction I want to set the scope of the book and provide some of the background that will underpin its ideas.

Architecture

The software industry delights in taking words and stretching them into a myriad of subtly contradictory ...