Some of the architectures look beautiful to me. I wonder what are some of the properties which make a Software Architecture beautiful and even if not beautiful ... very attractive. To be attractive something should be easily understood. Fewer concepts, fewer new concepts and simpler relationships between those concepts would constitute simplicity. If something is complicated you have to force your mind to understand it and chances are high that it will not appear beautiful unless the payoff of effort is higher. Later brings us to "surprise" aspect - core of Application Server like JBoss has nothing to do with applications or JEE, it is JMX, interested in only starting/stopping services.
Then something that brings a wow is, how much thinner the software can get. A big application server can have a microkernel only 50K size. That is beauty. For something flexible enough to grow very very big and shrink very very small, the core pattern has to be simple. And that pattern has to be repeatedly applied. And with zero exceptions. That catches attention.
And finally, recurrence. That always is attractive. The services of JBoss are MBeans loaded by core, but core itself is MBean. All this takes me to Mandelbrot ... aren't principles of what is beautiful same?
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
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