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The Architecture of Open Source Applications Paperback – May 19, 2011

by Amy Brown (Author), Greg Wilson (Contributor)

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Architects look at thousands of buildings during their training, and study critiques of those buildings written by masters. In contrast, most software developers only ever get to know a handful of large programs well — usually programs they wrote themselves — and never study the great programs of history. As a result, they repeat one another’s mistakes rather than building on one another’s successes. This book’s goal is to change that. In it, the authors of twenty-five open source applications explain how their software is structured, and why. What are each program's major components? How do they interact? And what did their builders learn during their development? In answering these questions, the contributors to this book provide unique insights into how they think.

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7.44 x 0.98 x 9.69 inches
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May 19, 2011
ISBN-10

1257638017
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978-1257638017
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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Lulu.com; null edition (May 19, 2011)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 432 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1257638017
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1257638017
Reading age ‏ : ‎ 1 year and up
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.69 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.44 x 0.98 x 9.69 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,473,704 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,913 in Software Development (Books)

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Francesco Cesarini
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Francesco Cesarini has used Erlang on a daily basis for over 15 years, having started his career as an intern at Ericsson’s computer science laboratory, the birthplace of Erlang. He moved on to Ericsson’s Erlang training and consulting arm working on the first release of the OTP middleware, applying it to turnkey solutions and flagship telecom applications.
In 1999, soon after Erlang was released as open source, he founded Erlang Solutions. With offices in the UK, Sweden, Poland (and soon the US), they have become the world leaders in Erlang based consulting, contracting, training, systems development and support services. In 2008, they launched the Erlang Factory conferences. At Erlang Solutions, Francesco has worked on major Erlang based projects both within and outside Ericsson, and in his current role as Technical Director, is setting the strategy and vision of the company while supervising the technical teams.
Francesco is active in the Erlang community not only through regularly talks, seminars and tutorials at conferences worldwide, but also through his involvement in international research projects. He is the co-author of Erlang Programming, a book published by O’Reilly Media in 2009. With whatever time he has left over, he teaches Erlang to graduates and undergraduates at Oxford University and the IT University of Gothenburg. You can follow his ramblings (mainly on Erlang and Erlang Solutions) on twitter.
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Russell Bryant
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Russell Bryant is a Distinguished Engineer at Red Hat, where he works in the Office of the CTO on cloud infrastructure and networking technologies. Prior to joining Red Hat in 2011, Russell was the project lead for the Asterisk open-source telephony project.
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Greg Wilson
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Dr. Greg Wilson is a programmer, author, and educator based in Toronto. He co-founded and and was the first Executive Director of Software Carpentry, which has taught basic software skills to tens of thousands of researchers worldwide, and has authored or edited over a dozen books, including "Beautiful Code", "The Architecture of Open Source Applications", and most recently "Software Design by Example". Greg is a member of the Python Software Foundation and a recipient of ACM SIGSOFT's Influential Educator of the Year award.
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Nnj

Excellent book

Reviewed in the United States on December 27, 2012

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The two part series is really worth the small price paid. The kindle experience is worth over the paperback edition. Lots of good reading, formatting is really neat and each chapter can be read like an individual story.

2 people found this helpful

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astatine

Excellent resource book

Reviewed in the United States on September 20, 2012

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I second the book's basic premise that most software engineers do not spend enough time looking at existing software to learn from them. This book tries to fill that gap by making available descriptions of many interesting projects. You can't replace actually studying major software projects, but this comes a pretty close second.

The book is an excellent collection of architectural/structural sketches of major open source projects. Many of them are written by the developers or maintainers of these projects and provide invaluable insight into why these projects are structured the way they are. The description of each project is an individual chapter and can be read in isolation. Each of these chapters have their own unique style and, in this case at least, I think the editors did a good job by leaving the differing styles intact.

Some chapters, like that on the Berkeley DB, identify explicit good practices; others describe their project and the challenges they have faced in sufficient detail for you to draw your own conclusions. And then there is the fascinating chapter on Continuous Integration which, instead of describing a single project, compares and contrasts the approaches taken to solve what seems to be a common problem in very different ways.

All in all a good book to keep handy. It is not a reference book which you will use for concrete information, but one that you will read to get inspiration from (or peace, when the sense of frustration with the software industry's practices inevitably creep over you).

7 people found this helpful

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Emre Sevinç

A gem that belongs to every serious developer's library

Reviewed in the United States on August 4, 2011

This is not a typical software development book but rather a wonderful collection of essays from the veterans. The editors did a great job by providing such a wide spectrum of programs and authors. From database systems to visualization toolkits, from mail transfer agents to multi-player online games, from continuous integration systems to cutting-edge web applications and then to audio processing systems, you'll find experienced developers talking about the internals of their well-established code bases, used by millions of people and developers worldwide.

Some of the authors have been working on the same system for more than 30 years (e.g. Eric Allman on Sendmail) and it is definitely a pleasure to hear their perspectives spanning such a long time period. Every chapter provides a brief overview of the relevant software and then the authors try to justify the choices they made, sometimes stating their regrets with reasons and sometimes reflecting on how their intuitive decisions turned out to be great strategic advantages in the long run. In some chapters such as the one by Audrey Tang (SocialCalc), you'll learn how it becomes possible to work together for a geographically distributed team of developers and what made Tang's job easy when she joined the team one year after the initiation of project (hint: a well-prepared Wiki becomes much more important than you can imagine).

I think this book belongs to every developer's library to be read and re-read. Time-honored lessons when told by insiders with the help of great editors provide us with an immense value in terms of technology, craftsmanship and community.

9 people found this helpful

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Scott Piper

Incorrect product description

Reviewed in the United States on November 13, 2011

The product description states that you will learn "What are each program's major components? How do they interact? And what did their builders learn during their development?" Also, that you will learn how the "software is structured, and why". You will learn how the programs are structured and nothing else. Some of the projects do have a paragraph or two on what the developer would do differently, but some (Asterisk for example is the first chapter) has no discussion at all on anything other than how the code in the project works. It's sort of good to prepare you to look at the code, but the book doesn't actually meet it's stated goals of telling you "why" anything is the way it is.

I would have given 1 star since I feel lied to about what was most important to me, but the discussions on how the projects work are interesting enough to give the book some merit.

IMPORTANT: You can read the entire book for free on the author's site: [...]

34 people found this helpful

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Alexander

Set of articles about open source projects

Reviewed in the United States on August 9, 2013

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Books consist of set of articles about open source projects.

Articles written by different people about projects they involved. Thats why quality and style differ from one article to another.
Some articles I found very interesting and some was about nothing. And I'm sure that another reader will have another opinion about which one was interesting or not.

After I've read this book, I took my notebook and wrote down all the ideas I found usefull and important.

Book is not quite well designed. I don't like fonts at all, and it also have some typography problems.

4 people found this helpful

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L. Figueroa

Technical images too small to make out

Reviewed in the United States on January 11, 2012

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I was eager to get my hands on a copy of this book so I purchased the Kindle edition straightaway. Unfortunately, the technical diagrams are way too small so the book loses much of its value for me. In my opinion, being able to process and digest a diagram layout of the software components is key to expressing the software architecture. I now plan on purchasing the hardcopy. This is one kindle purchase I regret.

13 people found this helpful

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Paul Ianas

I like this book

Reviewed in the United States on September 6, 2013

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First of all, I love the idea of presenting the architecture of well-known open source applications. The way the information is presented makes it also a nice lecture, by presenting the architecture and the main ideas in an informal way.

One person found this helpful

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Ryan

Rather boring

Reviewed in the United States on September 16, 2013

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I might have just had too high of expectations for the book, but I've yet to be able to make it all the way through it. People's examples of why they chose architecture mostly seems to just be a description of what exists, not the logic that went into making it so, which is what I really wanted from the book.

15 people found this helpful

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Rahul Pawar

Damaged book

Reviewed in India on November 17, 2019

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I had to return this because the book was damaged. It looked as if it was used.

Gio

Interesting real cases and solutions

Reviewed in Italy on February 25, 2017

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A good reading for getting in touch with architectures created for solving particular problem or needs. Good for mid level and seniors too but probably more helpful for juniors starting worrying about arch

adacta

Fehlstellen im Druck

Reviewed in Germany on April 26, 2015

Verified Purchase

Eine interessante Übersicht über die Architektur verschiedenster Open Source Projekte. Beiträge in unterschiedlicher Qualität, vielleicht zu oft eine eher langweilige Aufzählung der "Features". Wirklich ärgerlich sind aber die Fehlstellen im Druck, die aber glücklicherweise nur in den Unterüberschriften (\subsection) auftreten. Beispielhaft etwa steht etwa auf Seite 25 zu lesen "2.8 Real-Time E ects". Offenbar hat der Druck ein Problem mit den Ligaturen. Gedruckt wurde übrigens von der "Amazon Distributions GmbH" in Leipzig.

One person found this helpful

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Mr. G. O. Roberts

Variable quality but really helpful.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 1, 2012

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This is a good book about real world software architecture and how it came to be. It consists of essays on many different software systems by the designers of those systems. As such some of the essays are less than useful due to repetition or writing where the author hasn't considered the best way to present his knowledge. These are far outweighed by the real world experience and architectural information handed out by people who've designed a very wide variety of successful software systems. This book will definitely inform my future software design.

Game Cat

A lot for one developer

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 1, 2013

Verified Purchase

This is the printed version of the set of papers you may downloaded from the website with the same name. So one should check for oneself if having the paper form is worth it. Note that all royalties go to Amnesty International, which I suppose is a Good Thing.

PLUS: The book is a good addition to the reading material of students making the passage from "programming in the small" to "programming in the large", so that they get an idea of what problems they may actually encounter and have to solve. The papers are also useful as intros to detailed studies of the systems they describe (in case one wants to help out and code a bit). One should not be afraid of technical details and have a general idea about program structure and implementation when reading this.

MINUS: The book should probably have been organized by themes. Instead of that, the papers come in alphabetical order of title. The bibliography might have been more extensive and an index would have been of some use. Finally, not everyone will be interested in all (or possibly even most of) the systems, problem areas or approaches explained herein.

WHAT THE HELL: The printed version has a problem with the f-ligatures - anywhere it is needed in the headings there are big jarring holes. Apparently the typeface used was incomplete and the editor asleep. The non-vector diagrams are fuzzy, evidently their resolution is not high enough for the printed form.

As said above, the book is not organized by themes, so let's do it here, in no other particular order.

DATABASES

* Berkeley DB (Margo Seltzer and Keith Bostic): For those who always wanted to know how a "serverless" database actually works.
* The Hadoop Distributed File System (Robert Chansler, Hairong Kuang, Sanjay Radia, Konstantin Shvachko, and Suresh Srinivas): Structure of the same.
* The NoSQL Ecosystem (Adam Marcus): An overview of the NoSQL approach; not fully sure about the theory. Consult February 2012 issue of IEEE Computer for more!
* Riak and Erlang/OTP (Francesco Cesarini, Andy Gross, and Justin Sheehy) - A distributed database written in Erlang.

VISUALIZATION

* VisTrails (Juliana Freire, David Koop, Emanuele Santos, Carlos Scheidegger, Claudio Silva, and Huy T. Vo): An extensive data exploration and visualization framework.
* VTK (Berk Geveci and Will Schroeder): Another visualization toolkit.
* Graphite (Chris Davis): Drawing and Graphing as with RRDtool.

MULTIPLAYER GAMES

* Battle For Wesnoth (Richard Shimooka and David White): A turn-based fantasy strategy game.
* Thousand Parsec (Alan Laudicina and Aaron Mavrinac): A game framework for multiplayer turn-based space empire strategy games.

JUSTIFIED ANCIENTS

* The Bourne-Again Shell (Chet Ramey): A must-read for beginning computer science Unix users, I reckon.
* Sendmail (Eric Allman): Eric talks about the life of Sendmail. He could have mentioned the Morris worm of 1988.

It would have been very interesting to also have a paper on the competing Postfix SMTP server. Sadly, no.

DEVELOPMENT TOOLS

* Mercurial (Dirkjan Ochtman): The distributed version control system.
* Eclipse (Kim Moir): The complex Eclipse IDE, how is it constructed?

TOOLCHAINS

* LLVM (Chris Lattner): The LLVM compiler toolchain
* CMake (Bill Hoffman and Kenneth Martin): Something to replace autoconf/libtool nastiness.
* Continuous Integration (C. Titus Brown and Rosangela Canino-Koning): A rather short discussion of various Continuous Integration Models (Buildbot, CDash, Jenkins, Pony-Build.)
* Python Packaging (Tarek Ziadé)

TESTING

* Selenium WebDriver (Simon Stewart): Exercise your web interface using Firefox and scripting.

SYSTEM TOOLS

* SnowFlock (Roy Bryant and Andrés Lagar-Cavilla): VM Cloning in the Xen hypervisor.

COMMS

* Asterisk (Russell Bryant): Overview of the telephony application platform Asterisk, unfortunately at reference manual level.
* Telepathy (Danielle Madeley): Modular framework for real-time communication.

SOCIAL DATA AND LE SHARING

* Jitsi (Emil Ivov): Desktop data sharing
* SocialCalc (Audrey Tang): Wikified Spreadsheet

OTHER

* Violet (Cay Horstmann): A lightweight UML editor.
* Audacity (James Crook): The sound recorder and audio editor Audacity, a good overview and discussion of design decisions.

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