The Third Bit

If you want to know why we created The Architecture of Open Source Applications (now in two volumes), you need look no further than the descriptions of other books about software architecture on Amazon. Here’s part of the blurb of one that appeared last year:

Specifically, the book shows you

• What software architecture is about and why your role is vitally important to successful project delivery
• How to determine who is interested in your architecture (your stakeholders), understand what is important to them (their concerns), and design an architecture that reflects and balances their different needs
• How to communicate your architecture to your stakeholders in an understandable way that demonstrates that you have met their concerns (the architectural description)
• How to focus on what is architecturally significant, safely leaving other aspects of the design to your designers, without neglecting issues like performance, resilience, and location
• What important activities you most need to undertake as an architect, such as identifying and engaging stakeholders, using scenarios, creating models, and documenting and validating your architecture

Did you notice that “the architecture of 10 (or 20, or 50) actual systems” wasn’t on this list?  You won’t find that in this book, either, or this one, or this one. I haven’t read the upcoming third edition of this one yet, but I used to have the first and second on my shelves, and it didn’t “show the blueprints” either. If any ambitious grad student is reading this, and looking for a great thesis topic, comparing what software designers actually talk about to what’s in the standard textbooks on the subject would, I think, be very interesting…

Architecture of Open Source Applications

We are very pleased to announce that The Architecture of Open Source Applications: Volume 2 is now available from Lulu.  A PDF version will go on sale in the next few days, and e-book will become available as soon as we can produce it.  Many thanks to everyone who contributed, and to the indefatigable Amy Brown for pulling it all together.  As always, all royalties will go directly to Amnesty International, so if you buy a copy, you’ll be helping to make the world a better place.

Architecture of Open Source Applications

Volume 2 is going to be another great book:

1. Apache Derby: Tiago Espinha
2. Diaspora: Sarah Mei
3. Distributed Systems: Kate Matsudaira
4. Erlang/OTP: Elise Huard
5. FreeRTOS: Christopher Svec
6. GDB: Stan Shebs
7. GPSD: Eric Raymond
8. Git: Susan Potter
9. Glasgow Haskell Compiler: Simon Peyton-Jones and Simon Marlow
10. ITK: Brad King and Luis Ibanez
11. Inkscape: Jon Cruz
12. Iron Languages: Jeff Hardy
13. K-9 Mail: Jesse Vincent
14. Linux distro: Allison Randal
15. Mailman: Barry Warsaw
16. MediaWiki: Guillaume Paumier, Sumana Harihareswara, Erik Möller, and Brion Vibber
17. Moodle: Tim Hunt
18. Mozilla build and release: John O’Duinn and others
19. OSCAR: Jennifer Ruttan
20. Open MPI: Jeff Squyres
21. OpenStreetMap: Harry Wood
22. Parrot: Christoph Otto
23. PostgreSQL: Selena Deckelmann
24. Processing.js: Mike Kamermans
25. Puppet: James Turnbull, Luke Kanies, and Nigel Kersten
26. PyPy: Benjamin Peterson
27. SQLAlchemy: Michael Bayer
28. Sakai: Ian Boston
29. ScummVM: Eugene Sandulenko
30. Twisted: Jessica McKellar
31. Yesod: Michael Snoyman
32. Yocto: Flanagan Elizabeth
33. ZeroMQ: Martin Sustrik
34. database evolution: Sheeri Cabral
35. jQuery: Addy Osmani
36. matplotlib: John Hunter
37. nginx: Andrey Alexeev

Architecture of Open Source Applications

Smart Bear Software is hosting two online panel discussions about The Architecture of Open Source Applications, at 1:00 pm EST on Wednesday, July 13, and again at the same time (with different panelists) a week later.  You can sign up on their site; we look forward to seeing/hearing from lots of you.

Architecture of Open Source Applications

In case you were wondering, The Architecture of Open Source Applications is now averaging about 4200 page views a day.  (The stats are corrupted a bit by all the clone sites that have popped up and kept our Google Analytics Javascript in their page headers; I’ve tried putting a filter in place at GA to exclude them, but instead it excluded all data for a three-day period. #itshouldntbethishard)

In related news, translations are now under way in:

• Chinese (both Simplified and Traditional)
• French
• Japanese
• Korean
• Portuguese (both European and Brazilian)
• Russian
• Spanish
• Ukrainian

and we have the following chapters lined up for Volume 2:

Many thanks as always to Amy Brown, my tireless co-editor, for organizing this.

Architecture of Open Source Applications

We have started recruiting for the second volume of The Architecture of Open Source Applications, and while I’m mostly pleased with how it’s going, there’s one glaring problem.  Here’s how the three collections I’ve edited in the past five years have broken down:

Ouch—I was very pleased that MS and AOSA 1 weren’t as bad as BC, but right now, AOSA 2 isn’t where I’d like it to. Its contributors also almost all speak English as a first language, which isn’t representative of all the great open source work being done elsewhere. We’d welcome help addressing both problems…

Architecture of Open Source Applications, Beautiful Code, Equity, Making Software

Thanks to heroic effort from Ian McDowell and Amy Brown, The Architecture of Open Source Applications is now available for the Kindle at Amazon.com for $9.99. As always, all royalties (well, all the royalties Amazon doesn’t gobble up) will go directly to Amnesty International. Now, who’d like to help us produce a professional-looking e-pub edition?

Architecture of Open Source Applications

As I wrote a couple of week ago, one of the reasons I started The Architecture of Open Source Applications project was to fill a gap I stumbled over while teaching at the University of Toronto. There are lots of books on software architecture (an Amazon.com search for that phrase produces over 600 hits), none of the ones I have looked at describe or analyze the architectures of a broad range of actual software systems in detail. Instead, they all spend their pages telling readers how important architecture is, and how to describe architectures using UML, Petri nets, and what-not. By analogy, it’s as if books on real (physical) architecture spent all their time talking about blueprints: how important it is to have them, different notations that can appear in them, tracking their changes over time, and on and on, without ever actually showing people the buildings those blueprints portray.  I know this isn’t because the people who wrote those books weren’t familiar with real software systems—all I can think is that they believe people won’t be interested in the specific, only in the general.

Puzzling…

Architecture of Open Source Applications

We are very pleased to announce that the Open Source Programs Office at Google has agreed to provide support so that Amy Brown can continue to work part-time on The Architecture of Open Source Applications while we put Volume 2 together. Thanks, Google—we appreciate your help a lot.

Architecture of Open Source Applications

So how is The Architecture of Open Source Applications doing?

1. As of this morning, we have sold 377 print copies and 244 PDF copies, which means we’ve raised about $5000 for Amnesty International. This is a little slower than sales of Beautiful Code were in its first two weeks, but better than Making Software; please help get the word out any way you can (and send us links).

2. We’ve had 88K visitors and 304.5K page views. Those statistics are slightly distorted by the fact that a couple of people have duplicated the site, and are somehow showing up on Google Analytics—I’m trying to figure that out—but they’re still healthy numbers.

3. Translations have started into Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), Japanese, Portuguese (Brazilian and European), Russian, and Spanish, and we’ve had inquiries about Turkish, French, and Korean. I had a brief look at using GlobalSight to manage the translation process, but it’s not small and my cycles are limited. If anyone has experience and/or would like to volunteer, please let me know. And speaking of translations, Ian McDowell of Zeus Technology in Cambridge (England) is putting together a Kindle version, which is proving to be a lot harder than it ought to be in the early 21st Century. We hope to have it up on Lulu for download and purchase early next week, and then we’ll tackle e-pub. You’d think this would be easy—you’d be wrong…

4. Work has started on Volume 2&! We’ve been promised chapters on Mailman, PyPy, and SQLAlchemy, and are actively looking for others in as-yet-uncovered domains. If there’s something you’d particularly like to see, and you know someone whose arm I could twist, please introduce us. (GDB? OpenSSH? Anything for low-power embedded devices? We’d like all these and more.)

5. A couple of people have asked about meeting up at OSCON 2011 in Portland in July. I won’t be able to attend, but if someone else would like to set something up on meetup.org or elsewhere, please let me know and I’ll share the link.

Architecture of Open Source Applications