The idea of using software architecture patterns derives from the aspiration of realizing a scalable solution with the priority of satisfying user demands. Furthermore, this concept includes such important aspects as security, manageability and performance. On the other hand, a wrong selection of software architecture design can lead to negative consequences. Therefore, software application development company must know the most popular ones and be aware of their usefulness in each particular case.
What is a software architecture pattern?
An architectural pattern is a pictorial representation of the entire system and its subsystems, as well as the roles and responsibilities, rules and even a roadmap to establish the relationships between all these parts. Simply put, it is a kind of “blueprint” of the future website, application or microservice that will be used during the development process.
How important are software architecture patterns?
Software architecture patterns are of great importance, since they can provide solutions to various problems in different areas. Using this concept, teams can simplify testing procedures by, for example, dividing them into smaller segments. By using software architecture patterns, developers can segment user requests into smaller chunks of data to avoid relying on a single server.
Below you will find some reasons to apply this approach during the application development phase.
Identify the basic characteristics of an application
Software architecture patterns play an important role in defining the basic characteristics of any application. This, in turn, helps define which patterns can be used for agile applications and which should be best leveraged for highly scalable ones.
Ensure quality and effectiveness
Ensure agility
Creating a “blueprint” of your future application provides you with a necessary level of agility, which in turn allows developers to apply numerous modifications and iterations in the future.
Problem resolution
Understanding the software architecture allows developers to have a clear picture of how future application components work. This approach allows developers to leverage best-in-class techniques to address all possible issues over time.
Increase productivity
The standardized principles used in software architecture patterns allow teams to quickly see the current status of the project. With this methodology, teams have the opportunity to increase productivity.
Distinguish between a software architecture process and a design process
However, it is more than transparent if we take both separately. Architectural patterns are used to create business logic, user interfaces, and other aspects, while design is used to implement business logic.
Software architecture patterns
There are several software architecture patterns that are currently used by teams.
Of layers
When applying this particular pattern, each layer has its own distinctive role in the application. Additionally, this approach allows you to modify different components of the application without affecting the other layers. Layered software architecture design patterns can be used by teams with inexperienced developers or to create applications in a limited time frame.
Client-server
In practice, this type of software architecture represents a distributed structure in which there are two main components: the client and the server. By applying a technique of this type, teams can facilitate interoperability between both components, which may or may not be located on the same network.
Master-slave
This is another distributed approach, where the master component has full control over the slaves. While the latter is responsible for managing independent tasks, the former compiles the results to display them.Below you can find the most popular ones.. In both cases, the master listens to commands coming from the user or clients. When a command is received, a slave is launched to execute it while the master resumes listening for more commands (such as the “suspend last command” command).
Pipe filter
In this structure, the various components are represented as filters that are used to sort data, which flows through special data pipes. Filters, in turn, represent a chain, which means that data leaving one filter then passes through another. The idea behind this approach is to decompose huge processes and components into smaller ones.
Broker
The broker pattern consists of three main components: brokers, clients and servers. This approach can be used to structure distributed systems with decoupled components. The broker acts as a coordinator, establishing communications between various components of the application.
Peer-to-peer
All individual components of this structure are called peers. Peer clients request services, while peer servers provide services to others. This approach is widely used in various file sharing networks. In peer-to-peer networks, resources such as processing power, storage or bandwidth are made directly available to network participants without the need for central coordination. Unlike the traditional client-server model, peers are both providers and consumers of resources. The emerging P2P collaborative system goes beyond a simple peer-to-peer service. Virtual communities are becoming more powerful, with peers bringing unique resources and capabilities, and providing services that go beyond what individual peers can offer, but that are beneficial to everyone.
Event-bus
It is an event-oriented architectural pattern with distributed asynchronous design. Allows custom software developer to create scalable solutions. The pattern can be used for all types of applications, from the smallest to complex solutions.
Model-view-controller
The model-view-controller or MVC pattern allows teams to split the front-end and back-end parts of the code and place them into different components. It simplifies the management of all code and makes it easy to tune each part of the solution (backend and frontend) separately.
View: View shows the information to the user.
Controller: Controllers handle user input.
blackboard
By applying this pattern, teams can use the blackboard idea to store global data. Blackboard can be updated by the knowledge source. The idea behind this architecture is that the multi-source control interacts with blackboard. It goes through several sources and once it finds a solution, the control publishes it.
Broadly speaking, the blackboard pattern consists of three components:
- A shared space to store data about the world (Blackboard).
- A set of algorithms (ML or otherwise) that read data from the world and publish the results to Blackboard.
- A set of modules that read the results from Blackboard and make adjustments to the robot accordingly.
Interpreter
Simply put, this architectural pattern defines the grammar of a language that will later be evaluated by the interpreter. Using this design, developers can technically use a regular expression, or even parse any human language and execute the interpretation. As part of this pattern, an expression interface is implemented that tells the interpreter to interpret a given context.
- This pattern is used in SQL parsing, symbol processing engine, etc.
- To implement this pattern, a hierarchy of expressions is used. There are two types of expressions here: terminal and non-terminal.
- Interpreter design patterns have a tree structure similar to the compounds design pattern, with terminal expressions representing leaves and non-terminal expressions representing compounds.
- A syntax analyzer generates the tree of expressions that must be evaluated. The parser cannot be considered part of the interpretation pattern.
Conclusion
By closely examining technology that can provide enterprise software development company with a means to increase productivity, senior engineers may be able to identify serious team composition issues. As a result, they can create appropriate training programs and facilitate the long-term growth of their company. At Innowise, our experienced engineers are experts in taking the best architectural approaches to software development.
Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions, and we will be happy to help you with your dream project.