Chapter 12. Target Architecture

The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.

”Frank Lloyd Wright, Time Magazine (Oct. 4, 1953)

In a modernization effort, the target architecture represents the as-desired system, providing the technical vision for the modernization effort. Without this vision, similar operations might be implemented completely differently, making it impossible to predict, model, gauge, or control the qualities of the system. The target architecture can also help to identify and resolve potential design risks resulting from inconsistent or contradictory requirements.

In its current configuration, the target architecture for RSS represents a best-of-breed integration of the J2EE and the B2B architectures described in the previous chapter. Both of these technologies are specified in the organization-wide SRF developed by the corporate architecture team. As discussed previously, the goal of the SRF is to promote interoperability and commonality . However, to be broadly applicable throughout the organization, the SRF must be necessarily vague in some respects. As a result, it is necessary to adapt the SRF to the requirements of a specific development effort, such as RSS, before it can be used successfully on that project.

In the case of RSS, we adapted the SRF by defining a collection of generic architectural patterns. Each of these patterns defines common operations and how they are supported by the SRF in the target RSS system.