Australian Architecture Forum oy oy oy
This past week, my coworkers Scott Shaw, Evan Bottcher, and Richard Durnall from TW Melbourne, and Gianny Damour from TW Sydney enjoyed our time speaking at the inaugral Australian Archtecture Forum in both Sydney and Melbourne.
The most fabulously contentious talk I attended was a round-table discussion from Gianny on the role of the (software) architect in an Agile project. The quote of the week was “Are you saying architects should be coding? Pig’s arse they should be!”, from my favourite Enterprise Architect in Sydney (Big G from a client). He also rightly quipped that a few months of me helping code on one of his core systems was enough to scare me back into doing EA work!
I discussed Plugin Architectures, spending most of the time on OSGi, and how they could be useful in coming years for incremental deployment (dormant features, production mocks, breaking down monolithic apps). I was surprised to see so many people, figuring it was more to raise awareness, and was delighted to discover 2 projects in Sydney that where heavily component driven with runtime composition. I look forward to hearing more about the day-to-day challenges they face with this interesting and powerful approach.
Evan had a great discussion on different approaches to dealing with legacy applications, encouraging us to not nuke them but to strangle or renovate them. I was asked to give an opinion on how to deal with a VB6 frontend migrating to a web app (no, not Big G’s crowd for those who are reading), and whilst my initial reply was to try the .Net porting tools as a stepping stone and to empathise with the challenge, I also think two more things: if the only reason to change is due to lack of MS support it’s probably not worth doing yet; or it is the ideal opportunity to redevelop from scratch as it is so old the users probably don’t use it like it was built anymore (i.e. it’s a detonate candidate anyway).
Scott talked about dynamic languages in the enterprise and was nicely interleaved with a great Ruby Nubies in our Melbourne office on Thursday night - it was great to see such a diverse crowd with many from the corporate IT space. The talk may have been mostly to the “converted” but it incorporated some of our work over the past 18 months on finding the “enterprise” gaps in RoR and tracking/helping those gaps get closed. We are so close in closing them now I have just started a JRuby project with a long-term client in Sydney. This is a significant event and I look forward to the collaboration with the ThoughtWorks RubyWorks team who have been marvellous in their support. We’re also fortunate enough to be using the single best piece of project software ever released - Mingle!
Richard’s session was totally packed in both cities as he described the way to approach aligning business process, agile requirements, and application architecture. Drawing on his Lean manufacturing experience and sitting right on top of how an SOA should be fabricated, I heard Jim’s voice ringing in my ears “construct your services along business process lines”. Rich is from the black country and Jim is Brummy so the accent is close enough for my upside-down ears. Correction: Jim pointed out my “gross cultural faux pas” in that he, too, is from the black country. Alreet.
On SOA, I hope to have some exciting details about the Ark SOA conference coming soon…
