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> Good architecture is almost timeless. As long as nothing changes, I can agree with you. But that's the point of architecture in the first place, to be there

> Good architecture is almost timeless. As long as nothing changes, I can agree with you. But that's the point of architecture in the first place, to be there for you when things change. The focus of architects should be to ensure that changes are as easy as possible and not to have an elegant design. I've seen some of the most elegant designs that are easy to maintain trashed due to changes in user requirements or changes to the market place. For this reason I advocate, and have advocated since I started developing in the early 90s, micro service/modular architectures. Java OSGi is currently my favorite environment (though I'm also investigating similar approaches in Clojure), but I've done this with C/C++ in the past as well using shared objects/dlls as the modularity mechanism. Good architectures adapt to change, they doesn't stay the same with time.

mattgreenrocks 12y ago
Elegance doesn't matter; simplicity does in the face of changing requirements. Or rather, elegance falls out of this simplicity. It's an emergent property, rather than an explicit aim. Thus, my favorite designs have traditionally resembled a microkernel in approach, where the kernel of the app exists only to facilitate disparate services to find and use one another. Interfaces are kept to an absolute minimum, and concerns like UIs or persistence are pushed to the edge of the system, where they should be. This design facilitates division of labor well; more novice developers can make a mess within their subsystem, yet have the damage contained. I usually bolt a pub/sub mechanism on relatively quickly, as this requirement is almost a given with a UI. Dynamic loading is indeed the ultimate modularity. Combined with this microkernel approach, extensions are just as powerful as built-in services. The only problem is you enter a new hell: managing dependencies/versions of the core vs the extensions. If you can control the release of the extensions as well as the core, you're set.

mattgreenrocks 12y ago

Elegance doesn't matter; simplicity does in the face of changing requirements. Or rather, elegance falls out of this simplicity. It's an emergent property, rather than an explicit aim. Thus, my favorite designs have traditionally resembled a microkernel in approach, where the kernel of the app exists only to facilitate disparate services to find and use one another. Interfaces are kept to an absolute minimum, and concerns like UIs or persistence are pushed to the edge of the system, where they should be. This design facilitates division of labor well; more novice developers can make a mess within their subsystem, yet have the damage contained. I usually bolt a pub/sub mechanism on relatively quickly, as this requirement is almost a given with a UI. Dynamic loading is indeed the ultimate modularity. Combined with this microkernel approach, extensions are just as powerful as built-in services. The only problem is you enter a new hell: managing dependencies/versions of the core vs the extensions. If you can control the release of the extensions as well as the core, you're set.