JavaZone 2010 - Then Our Buildings Shape Us: Form and Content in Software Development
Winston Churchill once said, "First we shape our buildings, and afterward our buildings shape us." The architecture of buildings yields valuable insights into how the way we design buildings determines the kinds of things we do inside of them. The other arts show a similar pattern: every individual artwork participates in an artistic form of some kind, which provides beneficial boundaries around the kind of expression that form can carry.
This provides a useful metaphor for software development. Rather than comparing languages and platforms using benchmarks and feature lists, the savvy architect pays attention to the tool's form. What is the tool naturally good at? What kind of values and priorities are reflected in a technology choice? Are they consistent with values of the team or the organization? Learn to see beyond the details and to the deeper structure of the technologies we employ.
Tim Berglund
Tim Berglund runs a consulting firm called the August Technology Group (http://augusttechgroup.com), which provides training and development services to customers building web applications with open-source tools running on the JVM. He likes it best when these include Groovy and Grails.
His technology interests span web applications, business integration, data architecture, and software architecture, but his greatest passion is to help developers improve in their craft. He is a speaker internationally and at on the No Fluff Just Stuff tour in the United States, and helps lead IASA Denver (http://iasadenver.org) and the Denver Open Source User Group (http://denveropensource.org) in the Denver area.
He lives in Littleton, CO with the wife of his youth and their three children.