Architecture Enforcement and Governance Using Aspect-Oriented Programming

I wrote an article in this month's NFJS magazine (June 2009 issue) on Architecture Enforcement and Governance Using Aspect-Oriented Programming.

The objective of this article is to give an overview of Reference Architecture (RA) and its significance in Enterprise Architecture space and how Aspects and Aspect-oriented Programming (AOP) can help enforce RA and manage Architecture Governance model.

I also discussed in the article, a sample Java application that uses several architecture rules to enforce good architectural and design practices such as Layered Architecture, Separation of Concerns, Domain-Driven Design etc.

The other articles published in the new issue are:

• Introducing Drools 5 by Brian Sam-Bodden
• Implementing "Web-2.0 Style" Popularity Filters by David Bock and Karen Gillison
• Scala as Concise Java by Venkat Subramaniam
  

If you haven't attended NFJS software symposium or read the magazine before, check them out. The conference sessions are very practical oriented and just like the title says the focus is on the architecture, design, and development techniques that you can take back to your company and start using them right away in your projects.

SpringSource Tool Suite (STS) is a free tool now

SpringSource has recently released their SpringSource Tool Suite (STS) IDE tool as a free version. If you are currently working on or planning on introducing Spring Framework in your projects, this is a very good development tool to use.

STS Project Main Page:
http://www.springsource.com/products/sts

I wrote a mini-article on InfoQ about the recent RC1 release of STS. Here is the link:
http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/07/springsource-tool-suite

Let me know if you have any feedback when you use this tool.

I will be speaking at ProjectWorld 2009 Conference

I will be speaking at upcoming ProjectWorld 2009 conference in June (06/24-06/26) in Baltimore. My presentation topic is Agile Application Architecture Trends. The presentation is part of the "IT Innovation and Trends" track which is new for this conference.

Here is the session abstract of my presentation:

Architecture Trends - Where We Have Been, Where We Are Going

The presentation will include the discussion on emerging design techniques like Domain Driven Design (DDD), Custom Annotations, Dependency Injection (DI), Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP), OSGi and Dynamic Languages. I will discuss some use cases where these techniques add value to the architecture and where they will be just an overkill. With upcoming releases of Spring 3.0, EJB 3.1, JPA 2.0 and Java EE 6, Java developer, not the product vendor, has once again become the core part of Software Development Process.

I want to focus on the emerging software architecture trends and how agile philosophy can drive architectural and design decisions in software development projects.

Some of the architecture trends I will be focusing in my presentation are:

• Cloud Computing
• Architecture Models (J2EE v. POJO)
• Domain-Driven Design
• Spring Portfolio
• Model-Driven Development
• OSGi
• Innovations in the Database Layer
• Software Product Lines

This will be my first trip to Washington DC/Baltimore area. I am looking forward to attending the conference which has excellent sessions and speaker line-up.

There is a 20% speaker discount off the conference standard rate for any one who registers on my behalf. Contact me if any one is interested in taking the advantage of the discount.

Adaptive Object Modeling - QCon Interview with Joseph Yoder

I did a video interview with Joseph Yoder on an innovative architecture concept called "Adaptive Object Modeling" at QCon San Francisco conference last November. This interview is now live on InfoQ website.

The highlights from Joe's interview include:

• What is Adaptive Object Modeling (AOM)
• How it differs from a traditional object model.
• Application domains where AOM can be used.
• Role of UML in adaptive object modeling efforts.
• Architecture and design validation of the adaptive object models.

Check out the video interview on InfoQ site.

InfoQ is offering online training classes on Cloud Computing, SOA and Agile Design topics

InfoQ web site is offering virtual training classes on topics like Cloud Computing, SOA and Agile Design hosted by reputed speakers like John Davies, Jim Webber, and Rebecca Wirfs-Brock.

These classes are not free (each class is currently priced @ $65 for one-hour "Briefing Session" and $135 for a half-day "Training Session"). The first training session is next Wednesday (May 27).

This is a good opportunity for software developers and architects who want to learn new technologies by attending a live training class and at the same time not spend a fortune that they would otherwise spend in attending technology conferences in person.

For more details on the new virtual training program, check out this link:

http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/05/virtual-training

If any of you attend these classes, let me know what you think about the quality and if the price is worth the class. Also, if any one has other topics they would like to see online training classes, e-mail me with the topic names. I will pass along the feedback and suggestions to the training program organizers.

Architecture Enforcement Presentation at SEI Architecture (SATURN) 2009 Conference

I attended the SEI Architecture Technology User Network (SATURN) 2009 Conference in Pittsburgh last week.

I gave a presentation at the conference on the topic Architecture Enforcement and Governance Using Aspects. I discussed an architecture enforcement framework I created to "inject" architecture rules and design policies into the application code as part of the Continuous Integration (CI) process using Aspects to enforce quality of the code.

This framework uses tools like Eclipse, AJDT and Maven to integrate policy enforcement into the agile development process to detect architecture deviations early and often and validates that the design and code are in compliance with the Reference Architecture (RA).

The response from the attendees was pretty good. There were questions on how to take the architecture enforcement back to the design documents like Class and Sequence Diagrams (UML) as well.

Overall, SATURN conference experience was excellent. This was my first time attending it. It was a good opportunity to learn more about the techniques and best practices in the areas of architecture evaluation, validation, and assessment.

Some of the highlights from the conference are:

• Keynote presentation by John Zachman on "Architecture Is Architecture"
• Rebecca Wirfs-Brock's keynote presentation on "Lessons Learned from Architecture Reviews"
• Tutorial on "Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture: A Pattern Language for Distributed Computing" by Doug Schmidt
• Tutorial: Integrating Architecture-Centric Methods into Object-Oriented Analysis and Design by Raghvinder Sangwan
• Birds-Of-A-Feather (BoF) session on Architecture Competence facilitated by John Klein

For more details on the events from the conference, check out this conference blog site.

NFJS, The Magazine

I recently attended New England Software Symposium in Boston. I spoke on Architecture Enforcement and Domain-Driven Development topics at the conference.

On the flight back to Detroit, I read the inaugural issue of NFJS magazine which is very interesting. It was full of technical information just like the NFJS conference, no fluff and a lot of technical stuff.

This issue has the following technical articles:

• A Case For Continuous Integration by Jared Richardson (author of Career 2.0 book)
• So you want to be Agile? by Venkat Subramaniam
• Introduction to Functional Languages by Ken Sipe
• Message Driven POJOs - Messaging Made Easy by Mark Richards

All are excellent articles and very informative with sample code explaining the concepts.

With the new magazine, Jay Zimmerman, Andrew Glover (Editor of the magazine) and NFJS team have done an excellent contribution to Java and Agile development communities.