Chapter 20. Beyond Fundamentals

Although this book covers a lot of material, it barely scratches the surface when it comes to building solutions. The primary focus of the book has been on understanding architecture and the architectural building blocks that are available for solutions.

Recap

The exploration began by examining how the focus of design for projects has evolved from system-centric to process-centric. The scope of designs is larger as well, including both people and systems: the total architecture. Three important architecture views were explored: process models, architecture patterns, and process-pattern mappings. Reference architectures were explored as abstracted architectures, providing generic solutions to generic problems.

The need for architecture as an essential activity in the development process was identified. Information was presented showing that the architecture activity can reduce project duration by up to 25%. The roles of both project and enterprise architect were explored, emphasizing the importance of the enterprise role in guiding multiple projects to converge on a single coherent architecture.

An overview of the major TIBCO products typically employed in a distributed solution was presented. The architectural highlights of TIBCO Enterprise Message Service, the TIBCO ActiveMatrix product suite, and TIBCO BusinessEvents were presented along with the typical life cycles of solutions built upon these products. Included was an overview of the SCA notation that is used as the design interface in TIBCO ActiveMatrix Service Bus.

A series of design patterns were explored covering a variety of topics: two-party interactions, policies, mediation, system access, two-party coordination, and multi-party coordination. A brief overview of services was presented.

The exploration concluded with an examination of how this information can be applied to the building of solutions. The notion of refinement was introduced as a process for adding detail to an architecture without fundamentally altering it. Two different approaches for applying reference architectures to building solutions were outlined and illustrated with several examples.

Looking Ahead

The material in this book provides a foundation common to solutions built upon TIBCO products. The focus has been primarily on combining small numbers of components to solve common problems associated with making components interact, accessing systems, and coordinating their activities. Looking at real-world solutions, these are mere building blocks. There is much more to be explored.

Toward that end, this book is just the first in a series of books designed to explore more comprehensive solutions. Planned books in this Addison-Wesley series include:

• Architecting Composite Applications and Services with TIBCO

• Architecting BPM Solutions with TIBCO

• Architecting Complex Event Processing Solutions with TIBCO

Keep an eye out for them!