Software Architecture: Foundations, Theory, and Practice

Chapter 11. Applied Architectures and Styles

The preceding chapters have described the core of software architecture, providing the notations, tools, and techniques that enable the designer to specify an architecture, implement, and deploy it. On the basis of those chapters one should be able to approach any design problem and successfully proceed. Such a simple declaration, however, belies the difficulties that arise when dealing with complex problems. Some problems just do not lend themselves to obvious solutions, or simple, uniform structures. One theme that characterized the chapter on designing architectures was benefiting from the lessons of experience. We continue that theme in this chapter, discussing how a wide variety of important and challenging architectural problems have been solved, thereby enhancing the repertoire of insights and styles that a designer possesses to bring to bear on his own problem.

Our motivation is the recognition that most new applications are complex, and must deal with a range of issues. Notably, many applications must deal with issues that arise from the application being on a computer network, wherein the application interacts with other software systems located remotely. Network-based applications may involve the Web, be focused on parallel computation, or focus on business-to-business interaction. We describe architectural styles for these and other applications.

In this chapter we also use the lens of software architecture to explicate a variety ...