15 June 2010

Concurrent architecture

To continue my thoughts about the programming language Erlang and especially how an architecture for a system implemented in Erlang would look like...

Joe Armstrong's PhD Thesis provides a very good understanding of the basic principles of Erlang. I think that some of the mechanism in the language makes several pattens in Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture Volume 2: Patterns for Concurrent and Networked Objects unnecessary.

I think it would be quite useful to describe the architecture in views. I think the "standard" 4+1 views could be used quite easy for a system implemented in Erlang as well.
However it may not be the logical view that the other views are derived from, rather I would think that the process view would be the basic view. Kruchten has an underlying assumption that the logical view is object-oriented. This is obviously not relevant for a system implemented in Erlang so a different notion of the logical view is necessary.

Joe Armstrong strongly suggest a hierarchy of processes. A problem domain model could be a good way to identify the top-level processes, e.g. the PDM classes could be the initial processes and the asynchronous interaction will be implemented as messages, since reality is asynchronous. I need to try this in practice though...

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