REVIEW

BEAUTIFUL ARCHITECTURE
What are the ingredients of robust, elegant, flexible, and maintainable
software architecture? Beautiful Architecture answers this question
through a collection of intriguing essays from more than a dozen of
today's leading software designers and architects. In each essay,
contributors present notable software architecture, and analyze what
makes it innovative and ideal for its purpose.
Chapter 1: What Is Architecture? By John Klein and David Weiss,
defines software architecture by examining the subject through the
perspectives of quality concerns and architectural structures.
Before you proceed to the examples, they would like you to consider
what an architecture is and what the attributes of a beautiful
architecture might be. As you will see from the different definitions of
architecture in this chapter, each discipline has its own definition, so
we will first explore what is common among architectures in different
disciplines and what problems one tries to solve with an architecture.
Particularly, architecture can help assure that the system satisfies the
concerns of its stakeholders, and it can help deal with the complexity
of conceiving, planning, building, and maintaining the system.
You end this chapter with a discussion of the attributes of beautiful
architectures and cite a few examples. Central to beauty is
conceptual integrity that is, a set of abstractions and the rules for
using them throughout the system as simply as possible. In this
discussion they will use architecture as a noun to denote a set of
artifacts, including documentation such as blueprints and building
specifications that describe the object to be built, wherein the object
is viewed as a set of structures.
Chapter 2: A Tale of Two Systems: A Modern-Day Software Fable by
Pete Goodliffe, provides an allegory on how software architectures can
affect system evolution and developer engagement with a project.
In this chapter, you will know the story of two such software cities. Its
a true story and, like all good stories, this one has a moral at the end.
They say experience is a great teacher, but other peoples experience
is even better, if you can learn from these projects mistakes and
successes, you might save yourself (and your software) a lot of pain.
The two systems in this chapter are particularly interesting because
they turned out very differently, despite being superficially very
similar. They were of similar size (around 500,000 lines of code). They
were both embedded consumer audio appliances. Each software
MENDOZA LPEZ JOS HILARIO
Grupo: 2 Semestre: 4

REVIEW

ecosystem was mature and had gone through many product releases
and the programmers themselves were the architects.

MENDOZA LPEZ JOS HILARIO

Grupo: 2 Semestre: 4