One of the most useful pages is a Survey of Architecture Frameworks. Rich and his colleagues have collected information on a wide range of architectural frameworks from industry and academia. Ours is there, of course (!) along with well-known frameworks such as TOGAF and Phillippe Kruchten’s original 4+1, but there are many others as well. The frameworks are described and categorised, and there are links to source websites where available.

If you find that our viewpoint taxonomy doesn’t give you all the coverage you need, or would just like to find out how other authors and organisations approach the subject, this is a great place to start.

Alternatively, if you know of any frameworks which aren’t mentioned (I am about to email Rich about CapGemini’s IAF framework for example) you can email Rich through the website.

In the interview we talk about the motivation behind the first edition of the book, and the rationale for some of the changes we made for the second edition (for example, adding the Context viewpoint). We also discuss architecture in the context of some of the “hot” topics for InfoQ readers such as cloud computing and agile development.

If you’ve never heard of InfoQ before, it’s a great online resource: “… InfoQ.com (Information Queue) is an independent online community focused on change and innovation in enterprise software development, targeted primarily at the technical architect, technical team lead (senior developer), and project manager. InfoQ serves the Java, .NET, Ruby, SOA, and Agile communities with daily news written by domain experts, articles, video interviews, video conference presentations, and mini-books.” They also help organise the QCon conferences in London and New York.

If you’ve downloaded any of these documents recently, please download them again to get the revised versions. All comments welcome!

The subject was ‘”Big Data” when the size of the problem is the size of the data itself.’

You can find more information here.

Welcome to the new website for Edition 2 of Software Systems Architecture!

Edition 2 was published in November 2011 and is a major revision of the original book. We have updated most of the chapters and added over 130 pages of additional content. The most important changes in this edition are as follows.

• We have introduced a new viewpoint, which we call the Context viewpoint. This describes the relationships, dependencies, and interactions between the system and its environment (the people, systems, and external entities with which it interacts). It extends, formalizes, and standardizes the relatively brief discussion of scope and context that used to be in Chapter 8.



• We have expanded the discussion of different aspects of the role of architecture in Part II.


• We have revised most of the viewpoint and perspective definitions, particularly the Functional and Concurrency views and the Performance and Scalability perspective.


• We have revised and extended the Bibliography and the Further Reading sections in most chapters.


• We have updated the book to align with the concepts and terminology in the new international architecture standard ISO 42010 (which derives from IEEE Standard 1471).


• We have updated our UML modeling advice and examples to reflect the changes introduced in version 2 of UML.