Hi All I've been heavily involved in architecture for 5 or 6 years and can attest to it's benefits. I don't consider application design to be an architecture exercise, which is more structural, but rather an engineering exercise, which happens withn an archiecture paradigm. There seems to be much confusion in the industry as to the differences. I'm more focused on systems architecture, but see a vary strong correlation with this pattern: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?FourLayerArchitecture
The way it works for me is there are layers and processes between them. In lower-level, more technical speak, the "processes" would be facilitated by interfaces and standards (which should always accompany the interfaces), allowing for these processes to be defined as variations of the generic to facilitate different scenarios, environments, etc. It really helps using these definitions and tools when modularising a system - which I see as underway in the mmbase community at the moment. Systems architecture would typically comprise : 1. The Business Rules/Processes layer 2. The Application layer 3. The Data layer 4. The Infrastructure layer When applied to the four-layer application-centric architecture, there is a very close fit and definitions find a "sweet spot" and implimentation is easy. I say all this because I feel it may be useful in creating the proper modular design for projects such as the suggested CMS Container project, and may be that off the back of that one exercise, a more facilitative mmbase and supporting documentation, interfaces and standards may emerge. Regards Emile _______________________________________________ Developers mailing list [email protected] http://lists.mmbase.org/mailman/listinfo/developers
