The Third Bit » Architecture of Open Source Applications

AOSA Volume 2 Roster

Greg Wilson — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 14:18:45 +0000

Volume 2 is going to be another great book:

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

Architecture of Open Source Applications Webinars July 13 and 20

Greg Wilson — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 13:20:40 +0000

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 Stats

Greg Wilson — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 00:39:32 +0000

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:

Apache Derby	Tiago Espinha
GDB	Stan Shebs
The Glasgow Haskell Compiler	Simon Peyton-Jones and Simon Marlow
GPSD	Eric Raymond
Inkscape	Jon Cruz
jQuery	Addy Osmani
Iron Languages	Jeff Hardy
ITK	Luis Ibanez and Brad King
K-9 Mail	Jesse Vincent
Mailman	Barry Warsaw
matplotlib	John Hunter
Open MPI	Jeff Squyres
Parrot	Christoph Otto
PostgreSQL	Selena Deckelmann
Processing.js	Mike Kamermans
Puppet	Luke Kanies, Nigel Kersten, and James Turnbull
PyPy	Benjamin Peterson
SQLAlchemy	Michael Bayer
Twisted	Jessica McKellar
Yesod	Michael Snoyman
ZeroMQ	Martin Sustrik

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

Mostly Pleased, But…

Greg Wilson — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 15:58:53 +0000

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:

Title	Female	Male	% Female
Beautiful Code	1	35	2.7%
Making Software	9	34	21%
AOSA 1	8	33	19.5%
AOSA 2	1	20	4.7%

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…

Now Available on Kindle

Greg Wilson — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 23:35:42 +0000

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?

Blueprints Are Not Architecture

Greg Wilson — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 19:10:38 +0000

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…

Thanks, Google!

Greg Wilson — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 15:26:09 +0000

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.

T Plus 10 Days

Greg Wilson — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 15:34:35 +0000

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.

Blue Pencil for Hire

Greg Wilson — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 09:30:29 +0000

Amy Brown, my co-editor on The Architecture of Open Source Applications, is available for freelance work. High quality, reasonable rates, knows her way around Lulu and e-book production, keen eye for detail—if you’re doing print-on-demand (or any other kind of publishing), she’s a great investment.

85K

Greg Wilson — Tue, 31 May 2011 23:21:11 +0000

The Architecture of Open Source Applications site has had over 85,000 visitors in the eight days since we launched. Nobody has asked about using it as a textbook yet, or taken me up on my excellent research idea, but I’m still hopeful…