We come to one of the best patterns for breaking a big problem down into bite-sized pieces.  The microservices architecture pattern is a perfect fit.  The objective is to farm out work to one or more services that are small and well-defined.  This pattern is one that has grown in popularity and is often seen in Cloud solutions. The Microservices Architecture Pattern Defined The architecture is another one that has three primary components.  There are client requests, an interface layer, and service components.  Likewise, the microservices architecture is another distributed pattern that allows the solution to grow as needed. In general, requests are directed to services via the interface layer.  That layer also can bundle or roll up responses so... Read more

The focus of this episode on software architecture patterns is the microkernel pattern.  It is a common way to build on core technology without the need for future design.  Once the plugin interface is defined, the sky is the limit for enhancements and upgrades.  You do all of this without impacting that core. The Microkernel Pattern Defined This approach starts with a core piece of functionality.  Next, other components are added to it.  We see this pattern utilized in many cloud products and commercial software.  The core can be protected, and then plugins farmed out.  Also, customers can purchase the core and then plugins a la carte.  In a technical sense, the core provides shared functionality across the system.  The... Read more

We continue our season of software architecture patterns and more by reviewing the interpreter pattern.  This one may seem familiar.  It has been discussed in other areas of software development.  However, it is worth refreshing our memory on this helpful solution. The Interpreter Pattern Defined The way this works is to start from a client, and given a context; we receive an expression.  That may be a very simple or complex series of “sentences.”  Next, the expression is broken down into parts that are individually interpreted.  Finally, the combined results are sent back.  That gives us yet another pattern that involves breaking the big problem down into smaller pieces.  Thus, it is easier to solve. Applying The Pattern There are... Read more

The blackboard pattern is arguably the least known among our first group.  This is a pattern that is not common because it is best used with some specialized tasks.  However, you may be familiar with it if you work in speech recognition, vehicle tracking, sonar signals interpretation, or similar open-ended forms of searching and matching. The Blackboard Pattern Defined Three appears to be the magic number for parts of an architectural pattern.  Likewise, this pattern again has three concepts that make it up.  There is the blackboard, the knowledge source, and the control.  These parts work together to match data to a solution. The Blackboard pattern uses the idea of a blackboard as a place to hold global data.  We... Read more