Sunday, September 6, 2009

Architectural Blueprints – The 4+1 Views:

Beginning of this paper reminded me of MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture style. At the end of reading this paper I am convinced that this architecture model can work well for big projects and may not be worth of including this much over head for small / medium size projects.
Here is the brief of this architecture –

Software architecture model proposed in this paper is made up of five main views

  • The logical view, which is the object model of the design.
  • The process view, which captures the concurrency and synchronization aspects of the design.
  • The physical view, which describes the mapping(s) of the software onto the hardware and reflects its distributed aspect.
  • The development view, which describes the static organization of the software in its development environment.
  • The description of an architecture—the decisions made—can be organized around these four views, and then illustrated by a few selected use cases, or scenarios which become a fifth view.

I like the fact that it is focusing on key elements and key users

  • End-user –Functionality
  • Programmers - Software management
  • System engineers – Topology - Communications
  • Integrators – Performance – Scalability

It is interesting to see these views developed. I tried to look back and see how the initial design of Design Town’s architecture views are (pretty interesting, try it out). I think, experience may be required to fully apply the “4+1” strategies in a project.

No comments:

Post a Comment