When my manager asked me to take the lead on building a new
Architecture area (
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/architecture/) on developerWorks, I cried out, No, please, anything but that!
You see, IT architecture is not my forte and I find IT architects to be among the most mysterious of IT professionals. They always want to talk about stacks! What are those? Let me come clean with you. I am not an IT architect. In fact, I am a Humanities major. Whats a humanitarian doing fooling around in the world of IT architecture, you ask? Well, IT architects are human. (long pause) Arent they?
OK, lest you think all is lost IBM has put a Humanities major in charge of an IT architecture section on developerWorks let me tell you that I am an obsessive-compulsive, neurotic humanitarian. That means that I am so afraid of not meeting everyones expectations that I break things down and I break things down some more until I finally have a set of pieces that even I can understand.
I would like to tell you that I have broken down the subject of IT architecture into pieces that even I can understand. I havent. But, with the help of my colleagues, I feel like we have broken it down into enough pieces that we can begin to offer our new architecture section to you. Notice I said begin. Theres more to come. Specifically, we decided to start out with possibly the most difficult of the architecture disciplines:
integration (
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/architecture/integration.html). Why did we choose to start with integration? Well, integration is a big part of what we call the architecture style of the day: Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). I can relate to SOA because it advocates breaking IT systems down into pieces that can be put together and reused to build multiple solutions, simple and complex. Is it just because I like to break things down into manageable pieces or does SOA sound like something you really ought to be paying attention to?
Be assured we will be rolling out the remaining IT architecture disciplines over time: enterprise, application, information, infrastructure, operations. Youll find some information about these disciplines on our architecture section now, but well be bringing you much more focused views in the future. In addition to focused information about the stalwart disciplines, our new architecture section brings you information about
requirements analysis (
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/architecture/requirements.html),
modeling (
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/architecture/modeling.html), and
assets and patterns (
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/architecture/reusable.html). Regardless of your discipline, you need to pay attention to requirements, and you should be modeling components of your solution before building them, and you certainly should be making your life easier by using already existing assets such as services, patterns, and templates to design and construct your solutions.
And finally, theres nothing like an example to drive concepts and recommendations home. Were bringing
sample projects (
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/scenarios/) to you too. These samples show you end-to-end how to start with a business problem and work through the process of designing, building, deploying, and managing an IT solution to the problem. Among our sample projects: merging the disparate IT systems of two companies involved in an acquisition. Ones a hip, young, Web-based company and ones an old, well established, legacy-based company. Guess who acquired whom.
Did I mention that we also have a slew of veteran IT architects who are sharing their
insight and outlook (
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/ar-itio1/) with you? And giving you recommendations, opinions, direction, and pointers to relevant resources by way of their
blogs (
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/index.jspa)? These blogs are not musings about the annoying behavior of cats or the incredible cuteness and intelligence of the bloggers children. These blogs are highly informative.
This one (
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/dw_blog.jspa?blog=396&cat=tutorials) by Bill Higgins actually contains a full tutorial on visual modeling and UML. Our blogs are instrumental in helping to define what you should be paying attention to in the world of IT architecture and leading you to content and resources throughout developerWorks and elsewhere that can help you get your job done and build your skills.
Let me close by extending a warm welcome to you I like the mysterious and an invitation to you to let us know how youd like to see this architecture section evolve, specific topics youd like covered, additional resources and tools youd like to see provided, and anything else we can provide to help you get your job done and build your skills, even if what you need is a bunch of stacks. Please use this forum to communicate with those of us at developerWorks and with each other about any architecture issues or topics that are on your mind (or on your Get-this-done-now! list).
Barbara Wetmore
Editor, developerWorks Architecture
