What's the difference between "Layers" and "Tiers"?
What's the difference between "Layers" and "Tiers"? ...
architecture
MMORPG / VR Architecture
Could anyone provide a link to the article / blog discussing architecture of the MMORPG or Virtual Reality Server or other system with rich 3D client. ...
Setting up an architecture department
Some context upfront: Imagine a 200+ developers company finally setting up a more or less independent architecture team/department. The software portfolio consisting of 20+ "projects"/applications of varying sizes in production was taken care of by team-leads/technical-leads, who were responsible for and in charge of the projects "archi...
What do you put in your webservice?
I have a website (ASP.NET) and some winforms(.Net 2.0) for a project (written in C#). I use the webservice (IIS6) for task that both require like sending email inside the business. I think Webservice is nice but I would like from your experience what should and what should not be in a webservice? ...
How to get up to speed on SOA?
I've been given the task of laying the groundwork of a SOA for my client. The goal is to open up various processes in an end-client independent way and also to make data available offline e.g. for reps visiting customers. I do have extensive experience with J2EE (Websphere) and web services but I would appreciate advice on how to build ...
UML connector Direction
When modelling an architecture in UML component diagrams, how do you show various attributes of connectors simultaneously? Like business object information flow (A->B, B->A, A<->B) request/response direction synchronous/asynchronous behaviour I am aware of other diagram types like sequence diagrams. However, having this information ...
How does SOA service discovery (UDDI) work in practice?
I'm just reading up on SOA and the service registry / UDDI get mentioned regularly. It sounds nice but how is used in reality? Is the registry meant to decouple a logical service from its' physical implementation (port, url etc)? Is the registry meant to be browsed by a human looking for an interesting service to play with? Would it b...
Extreme Sharding: One SQLite Database Per User
I'm working on a web app that is somewhere between an email service and a social network. I feel it has the potential to grow really big in the future, so I'm concerned about scalability. Instead of using one centralized MySQL/InnoDB database and then partitioning it when that time comes, I've decided to create a separate SQLite databa...
Really Young Software Architect Question
Hi, I am a really young software engineer/QA Team leader. I have been developing software for about 2 years and for 1 of those years I have also been the head of the QA team at a software development company. Currently I am still working as the QA team leader/software engineer for QA tools. Recently I have been invited to join a grou...
An affordable tool for DB modeling
Hello! Could you guys recommend some affordable SQL modeling tool which supports SQL Server, PostgreSQL and MySQL? I'm looking into up to $300 per license range. One tool per answer, please! Thanks! ...
Coder/Developer to Architect; Your experiences, realisations, Myths broken.
A lot of us in IT begin as coders/developers and some as coder/developer/business developer depending on whether you work for someone else or your self. While there is the list of what ideally the Architect should be doing and should know, I've found from asking around that it is not always so. It probably depends on the location at whic...
Manager classes
Hello all, In a recent project I have nearly completed we used an architecture that as its top layer of interaction from the web/services layers uses XXXManager classes. For example, there is a windows services that runs on a scheduled basis that imports data from several diverse data sources into our system. Within this service seve...
.NET Architectural issue: 2 Web Services, how do I change which one is used at run time?
I am working with Reporting Services and Sharepoint, I have an application that leverages reporting services however a client would like our application integrated into sharepoint. Currently we are tightly coupled to the ReportService.asmx webservice which exposes various methods for performing operations. Reporting Services has somethin...
Polyglot Programming: Is building applications with multiple languages a good practice?
I am considering building an application that is a blend of a dynamic language (python or ruby) and compiled language and need some help getting convincing myself that this is a good idea. My thought are that I can use a dynamic language to get a lot of code written quickly, and then dropping down to a compiled language like c/c++ to im...
Choosing a database type
When would you use a bigtabe/simpledb database vs a Relational database? ...
How should the Data Access Layer be structured?
I initially designed my system following the s# architecture example outlined in this codeproject article (Unfortunately, I am not using NHibernate). The basic idea is that for each domain object that would need to communicate with the persistence layer you would have a corresponding Data Access Object in a different library. Each Data...
Desktop Applications: Architectural Frameworks?
I'm wondering if there are any architectural frameworks out there to create desktop or standalone applications, in Java or C# for instance. It seems that there are tons of them available for web applications but I can't find many good resources on frameworks or architectural best-practices for desktop development. Ideally I would like t...
Detecting CPU architecture compile-time
What is the most reliable way to find out CPU architecture when compiling C or C++ code? As far as I can tell, different compilers have their own set of non-standard preprocessor definitions (_M_X86 in MSVS, __i386__, __arm__ in GCC, etc). Is there a standard way to detect the architecture I'm building for? If not, is there a source for...
Structuring projects & dependencies of large winforms applications in C#
UPDATE: This is one of my most-visited questions, and yet I still haven't really found a satisfactory solution for my project. One idea I read in an answer to another question is to create a tool which can build solutions 'on the fly' for projects that you pick from a list. I have yet to try that though. How do you structure a very la...
Are there any open source projects using DDD (Domain Driven Design)?
I'm trying to understand the concepts behind DDD, but I find it hard to understand just by reading books as they tend to discuss the topic in a rather abstract way. I would like to see some good implementations of DDD in code, preferably in C#. Are there any good examples of projects practicing DDD in the open source world? ...