I keep my desk pretty minimal. Its pretty big, but the desktop is usually about 80% cleaned. The few things that I keep on it, other than a notebook and pen, are strategically placed and are designed to be conversation pieces. These items include a 2 gallon fish tank, with a Tiger Barb and plant, a poseable Gumby figure, and the latest addition, my Architecture Rules mug.

Now, the whole reason for these artifacts is to draw those two pass by my desk into a conversation - this offers a break in the day and a chance to get to know the people around me better.

The fish tank has been very popular, a lot of people can relate, or have a story, or just like to look at the fish. Gumby is a lot of fun. Its fun to see those who recognizes him, and those who don’t even know who Gumby is. I wanna order a couple of Blockhead figures to go along side him.

So the new one is the Architecture Rules mug that I designed and put up on CafePress. This has been a great way for me to get the people around me to talk about software, and specifically, about software architecture. I highly recommend that, if you use Architecture Rules, you pick up one of these mugs, put it on your desk, and start telling the world that you are actively mitigating architecture risk everyday. Hey, thats something you, your coworkers, your customers, and your bosses can get behind.

Or, if you’re just looking for a new trinket to put on your desk, this mug is a lot cheaper and easier to maintain than a fish tank is. I have personally tested the mug and had successfully results with coffee, water, various teas, apple cider, and soup.

I have to be honest, the price that CafePress charges, of $13.99, is rather steep for a mug, but it is a tall mug with a capacity of 15 oz., and a buck or so goes to supporting Architecture Rules. Right now we are trying to raise funds to snag the domain architecturerules.com. Your purchase would go a long way in helping to secure that domain.

Here you can check out the upclose graphic. And if you can’t afford the mug, but you wanna help us get the domain or help us towards our current fund raising goal, you might be able to donate some change to the project.

So, what toys do you keep on your desk? What are the best conversation starters? Do you keep any trinkets branded with a tool or technology (my pen branded with Sun Java)?

The term “software architecture” is really hard to nail down. Different people have been defining it differently since we began writing software. I am not going to be able to tell you exactly what it is, but I can give you an idea as to what people are saying. By understanding that no one agrees on what architecture means, you can throw out the term more carefully as you talk with other developers.

First, I want to share one my favorite “white papers.” I, for many years, didn’t know what people meant when they said architecture (actually, they probably didn’t either) but after reading this 3 page paper by Martin Fowler, I finally wrapped my head around it. The document is titled “Who Needs an Architect” and can be downloaded from the author’s site. The light bulb when on for me when I read these lines…

“Remember Johnson’s secondary definition: “Architecture is the decisions that you wish you could get right early in a project.” Why do people feel the need to get some things right early in the project? The answer, of course, is because they perceive those things as hard hard to change. So you might end up defining architecture as “things that people perceive as hard to change”

“There is no theoretical reason that anything is hard to change about software. If you pick any one aspect of software then you can make it easy to change, but we don’t know how to make everything easy to change. Making something easy to change makes the overall system a little more complex, and making everything easy to change makes the entire system very complex. Complexity is what makes software hard to change. That, and duplication.”

Finally, now that makes sense to me. I’d paraphrase it as “The parts of a software system that you need to get right, the first time.” In the article, there is a discussion about a building. They mention the basement. When you have a home, you can change the interior around, add new paint, take down a wall, put up a wall, even build a new addition. However, the basement is the foundation. It’s not going anywhere. You can modify a house, but you can’t modify the basement. The basement makes up the home’s “architecture,” (but don’t confuse the basement with a database.)

Different people have been defining it differently since we began writing software.

I made this pretty bold statement to start off this explanation. Well, I have the proof to back it up. The Software Engineering Institute has a website. At it, they bring together published Modern, Classic, and Bibliographic Definitions of architecture. They also allow the “community” to submit their own definitions. They have one to two hundred definitions from senior analysts, project managers, software architects, doctors, and other “really important people.” These definitions follow many different themes, from definitions around concrete software, to definitions based on only the concepts of the software. Check out this list of Community Software Architecture Definitions for yourself.

We’ll finish this off by sharing some content off of page 13 of a white paper titled Building Enterprise Architecture from Endava.com

Architecture is defined as a subset of the design. While it is difficult
to define which subset, the following definitions help:

“The highest-level concept of a system in its environment.”
(IEEE)

The organization or structure of significant components, and
their interactions.

An abstraction of a system’s implementation.
The parts or aspects of the design that are considered
important.

The parts or aspects of the design that need to be
understood by many people, the shared understanding of
the system design

The decisions that are (or are thought to be) hard to change.

Another shining example of how many different definitions for Architecture there is.

Want to share your definition? What did you learn architecture to be?

We have all seen method chaining, especially in configuration classes. Architecture Rules has a typical configuration class that currently does not support method chaining. Modifying the public API of a tool is hardly ever a good thing, but in this case, the change would still be completely backwards compatible. So we decided to investigate method chaining to determine if it should be introduced into this project or not.

What is it

Method chaining is a programming technique that is supported by many public interfaces. It allows the programmer to call one method from - directly after - another. For example, in Java:

Event event = new Event()
.setDescription("")
.setStartDate(start)
.setEndDate(end)
.setPrivate(true);

Event event = new Event();
event.setDescription("");
event.setStartDate(start);
event.setEndDate(end);
event.setPrivate(true);

Configuration configuration = new Configuration()
.addClass(org.hibernate.Item.class)
.addClass(org.hibernate.Bid.class)
.setProperty("...dialect", "...MySQLInnoDBDialect")
.setProperty("...connection.datasource", "java:jdbc/test")
.setProperty("...order_updates", "true");

class Event {

public Event setDescription(String description) {
this.description = description;
return this;
}

public Event create() {
... something complicated ...
return this;
}
}

Event event = new Event()
.setDescription("").setStartDate(start).setEndDate(end);

int eventId = new Event()
.setDescription("")
.setStartDate(start)
.setEndDate(end)
.setPrivate(true)
.insert()
.getId();

List cats = session.createCriteria(Cat.class)
.add( Restrictions.like("name", "Fritz%") )
.add( Restrictions.between("age", minAge, maxAge) )
.list();

boolean valid = validator(value)
.isGreaterThan(0)
.isLessThan(10)
.isCurrancy();