Software Architecture: Perspectives on an Emerging Discipline

by Mary Shaw, David Garlan

Good software developers often adopt one or several architectural patterns as strategies for system organization. But, although they use these patterns purposefully, they often use them informally and nearly unconsciously. This book organizes this substantial emerging "folklore" of system design -- with its rich language of system description -- and closes the gap between the useful abstractions (constructs and patterns) of system design and the current models, notations and tools. It identifies useful patterns clearly, gives examples, compares them, and evaluates their utility in various settings -- allowing readers to develop a repertoire of useful techniques that goes beyond the single-minded current fads. KEY TOPICS: Examines the ways in which architectural issues can impact software design; shows how to design new systems in principled ways using well-understood architectural paradigms; emphasizes informal descriptions, touching lightly on formal notations and specifications, and the tools that support them; explains how to understand and evaluate the design of existing software systems from an architectural perspective; and presents concrete examples of actual system architectures that can serve as models for new designs. MARKET: For professional software developers looking for new ideas about system organization.

Genres: Software, Architecture, Technical, Computer Science, Technology, Programming

264 pages, Paperback

First published April 12, 1996

About the author

an American software engineer, and the Alan J. Perlis Professor of Computer Science in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, known for her work in the field of software architecture

Reviews

[Christoph Kappel]

This book really reminded me on books for lectures during my university time. I know this book is quite old, but still it felt a bit too heavy and the academic approaches with the models and the Z language didn't help here either.

What I found interesting though was the comparison of different architecture approaches for concrete examples, like the robot ones, although I think the results are a bit difficult to grasp.

And I also liked the points about migration from craftsmanship to engineering: My impression is we we still didn't achieve this yet.

[Dave]

A mixed bag, some parts of this book were so profound I lingered for hours on a single sentence, other parts were banal descriptions of abstract software architecture style so dull that when I picked the book up again I had forgotten the context of the entire chapter.

[Anurag]

ok

[José Luis]

The first serious work on emerging architectural patterns. A remarkable book that paved the way to the development of software architectures.