About fourteen months ago, David Trowbridge of patterns & practices introduced me to a guy working in their testing group named Larry Brader. David is one of the primary authors of p&p’s Enterprise Solution Patterns and Integration Patterns books. I wanted to talk to David about building a pattern repository and he handed me off to Larry. Little did I know that Larry is an information theorist and was one of the key authors of Testing Software Patterns. Frankly, when Larry gets rolling on info theory, I only understood a fraction of what he’s saying. But the parts I do understand about how patterns relate to each other blows my mind.

Then p&p hired this guy…what’s his name?…Oh yeah, Ward Cunningham. I hear he knows a bit about pattern repositories. 😄

Anyway, around this time last year I was having regular meetings with Larry and Ward to talk about this repository stuff. Then stuff got crazy on my end – primarily being the acting marketing director for my team as well as the ARC track owner for last years TechEd. The regular meetings became more irregular and then stopped altogether. That is to say, my involvement stopped – Ward, Larry et.al. kept forging ahead. I heard about how things were going from time to time, but that was the extent of my involvement.

Last summer, Larry, Ward and David (plus others I’ve never met) published an article called Describing the Enterprise Architectural Space. (They also did a webcast on the topic.) In it, they laid out a way of thinking about how patterns relate to each other and they introduced the Enterprise Architectural Space Organizing Table (EASOT for short). That was just the first step. PatternShare is next one.

PatternShare is a community site that brings together the patterns from popular authors – Fowler, Evans, Hohpe & Wolfe, GoF, POSA and p&p - into a single repository. Furthermore, it provides a dynamically generated EASOT showing all the patterns in the repository and how they relate to each other. Finally, it provides a way to add new patterns to the repository so that they show up in the EASOT.

Major congrats to Ward, Larry, David and the rest of the p&p folks for pulling this off. I can’t wait to see where the site goes from here.

Is it obvious that I’ve been rounding up bloggers on my extended team of architects and architect evangelists? Here’s another: Raj Wall blogged the first of what appears to be several posts about Patterns of Successful Software Projects. I like this as it really starts to expand the idea of what is a pattern. If you look at EASOT, you’ll notice a “Development Architecture Viewpoint” that has the following description:

The development architecture viewpoint is concerned with implementing the other architectures. Applications must be built and maintained in a systematic, efficient manner. The development architecture is composed of elements related to this effort, such as design and development tools, repositories, build master utilities, test suites, tracking tools, and other tools.

In my TheServerSide.net Tech Talk, I pointed out that Test Driven Development is a pattern. I know there are a lot more development architecture patterns. Raj’s post starts to define the terms in this area of the pattern space. Can’t wait to see what Raj has to say about project context – the more I work with patterns, the more important I realize context is.

We just published a white paper about the Enterprise Architectural Space Organizing Table. Basically, this is a table for categorizing architectural artifacts such as patterns. It owes a great deal to Zachman, but really builds out the concepts of roles and viewpoints. In addition to the white paper, you can get a PDF of the table itself.

What’s ultra-cool about this table is that it’s what the p&p group uses internally. The white paper maps every pattern MSFT has published into the table. You can also see the EASOT viewpoints in action in the Project Notebook section of Integration Patterns. When I saw a print of the table hanging on the wall in p&p’s building, I knew I wanted to see it published online. Love it or hate it, it’s real.

What do you think? Obviously, we’re planning on building on EASOT going forward. Is this useful? Valuable?

Streaming producer presenations from TechEd US have been posted. However, the streaming presenation site has the same lack-of-url-addressability issue that TechEd Breakout session list had. Is it so hard to just post a simple HTML file with a list of all the sessions in a track? <sigh>

Anyway, here are links to the top 5 sessions from this year’s architecture track. For those who could not make it to TechEd (or were there, but missed these sessions) enjoy!

1. Realizing SOA by John deVadoss & Ron Jacobs
2. Data in SOA by Harry Pierson (i.e. yours truly)
3. Patterns in the Enterprise by Gregor Hohpe
4. Improving Application Perf & Scale by Chris Kinsman
5. Building Apps with P&P App Blocks by Wojtek Kozaczynski

Update: The streaming site has been taken down, so none of the links work anymore. Sorry about that. We will be updating the Architecture Strategy Series at some point in the future with at least the Realizing SOA and Data in SOA talks.

If you were intrigued by my Software Factories post last week, you might want to consider attending OOPSLA ’04. It’s in Vancouver this year, making it an easy trip from Seattle for me. There’s going to be an all-day tutorial on Using Domain Specific Languages, Patterns, Frameworks and Tools to Assemble Applications presented by the authors of Software Factories. There’s also a half-day tutorial on Generative Software Development presented as part of the Generative Programming and Component Engineering ’04 conference, which is co-located with OOPSLA ’04. OOPSLA will also feature talks by Rick Rashid, Steve McConnell, Ward Cunningham and Herb Sutter. And I’m not quite sure what this is about, but Jaron Lanier will be presenting a keynote entitled: “Exocomputing in the Year 2304: A Survey of Confirmed Alien Information Technologies”. I’ve got to check that out, if just to see what confirmed alien information technologies look like.