Software Architecture Methodologies

This is Avanish Chauhan, working as a scrum master/senior developer with Luxoft Krakow. I joined this organization one year ago and got multiple opportunities to grow professionally and personally.

Today, I am going to discuss various software architecture methodologies. Being in the role of software architect for the last few years, the biggest challenge I faced, how to choose the best software architecture methodology out of the available methodologies. Today, we have various methodologies in the market, having their own pros and cons. Selection of best architecture methodology is very crucial for the project’s success, now the question arises, how to determine which one is the best?

This question can be answered by considering the following points:

Software architecture methodology used to develop a blogging website can not be used to develop a banking application or licensing application. A blogging site can ignore security concerns, but these are the crucial parts of a banking application. So application type matters a lot while deciding architecture methodology. Let’s see the following differences in using these widely used software architecture methodologies.

I am listing down a few widely used architecture patterns with their real-world application along with a brief introduction.

i. Model — Holds the business logic

ii. View — Component which is visible to the end-users

iii. Controller: It intercepts all the incoming requests from the users.

In this pattern, all three layers are decoupled and can be reused effectively.

Real-world applications:

i. While developing any web application, this architecture pattern is the best use case.

ii. Many Java-based frameworks implement this pattern like Spring MVC.

2. Layered Pattern: This pattern can sometimes be considered as an extension of the MVC pattern with an extra layer. This pattern follows the concept of abstraction and each layer takes the responsibility of providing inputs and services to the next layer. There are four layers in this pattern:

i. Presentation: Responsible for displaying UI components to the users

ii. Application: This is also known as the service layer, which handles the application logic.

iii. Business logic: This layer takes care of domain logic and business logic is implemented here.

iv. Data Access layer: Also known as the persistence layer takes care of all the database operation (CRUD). Uses DAO and DAOImpl to perform the CRUD operations on database objects.

Real-world applications:

i. Mostly all E-commerce applications use layered architecture patterns as it is easy to decouple one concern from the other.

ii. Suggested architecture pattern to develop desktop applications.

3. Master-Slave pattern: As the name suggests, it involves one Master and multiple slaves. The master delegates the tasks to the slaves and on the basis of results received from the slaves, master calculates the final result.

Real-world applications:

i. While setting up a CI/CD pipeline in an enterprise project using Jenkins, this pattern is used to set up Jenkins master and slave nodes.

ii. While creating copies of a database or replicating the databases, the master-slave pattern is kept under consideration.

4. Broker Pattern: While working in a distributed systems environment and there is a requirement to decouple the components, Broker pattern comes as the savior. All the components communicate by RMIs or remote services. To coordinate the communication among decoupled components Broker takes the responsibility. The broker pattern follows the pub-sub and point-to-point communication approach.

Real-world applications:

i. MQs — Rabbit MQ, IBM MQ, Apache Active MQ, Apache Kafka.

5. Event-driven pattern or Event bus pattern: This pattern consists of four components:

i. Source of the event

ii. Event Listener

iii. Channel

iv. Event bus

Event sources publish messages to the dedicated channels which are there on event bus, event listeners which are subscribed to particular channels get the notification when there is any message published to that channel.

Real-world applications:

i. Push notification services

ii. Application development (Android based)

So, whenever you plan to choose a software architecture methodology for your application, consider the above-mentioned points and take the bold step.

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