Beautiful Architecture: Leading Thinkers Reveal the Hidden Beauty in Software Design

What are the ingredients of robust, elegant, flexible, and maintainable software architecture? Beautiful Architecture answers this question through a collection of intriguing essays from more than a dozen of today's leading software designers and architects. In each essay, contributors present a notable software architecture, and analyze what makes it innovative and ideal for its purpose. Some of the engineers in this book reveal how they developed a specific project, including decisions they faced and tradeoffs they made. Others take a step back to investigate how certain architectural aspects have influenced computing as a whole. With this book, you'll discover:How Facebook's architecture is the basis for a data-centric application ecosystemThe effect of Xen's well-designed architecture on the way operating systems evolveHow community processes within the KDE project help software architectures evolve from rough sketches to beautiful systemsHow creeping featurism has helped GNU Emacs gain unanticipated functionalityThe magic behind the Jikes RVM self-optimizable, self-hosting runtimeDesign choices and building blocks that made Tandem the choice platform in high-availability environments for over two decadesDifferences and similarities between object-oriented and functional architectural viewsHow architectures can affect the software's evolution and the developers' engagement Go behind the scenes to learn what it takes to design elegant software architecture, and how it can shape the way you approach your own projects, with Beautiful Architecture.