TEAM Zarate Tarrani Notes From the Field

Architecture. One of this entry's topics is architecture. There are three starting points that I recommend:

1. Jan Bosch's home page. Mr. Bosch is the author of Design and Use of Software Architectures, which I reviewed on Amazon on 30 April 2001. I recommend Mr. Bosch's page and the book because it extends the Software Engineering Institute's Architecture Trade-off Analysis Analysis (ATAM) approach in ways that fill gaps that I feel are in the ATAM. This is not criticism of ATAM itself, because it will assure consistency and realism in defined architectures. That I prefer Mr. Bosch's approach reflects my preference, but does not exclude other methods and approaches that are equally valid. Remember, there is no such thing as a perfect model or approach, but some are more useful than others.
2. USC Center for Software Engineering's Software Architecture group is an excellent source of leading edge research and information.
3. Gert Florijn's software architecture resources has links to all of the major architecture sites on the web.

In addition, I recommend Kevin J. Sullivan's page at the University of Virginia, especially his Learning Java page, which has architecture-related papers and resources. You will also find a few documents and links in the December 2000 issue of the Infrastructure Management Newsletter that Linda and I published before we discovered weblogs.

Open Source. There are two open source Oracle tools I want to share:

1. Oracletool, which is an interactive, web based application that runs as a CGI script using your web server.
2. TOra, which is a cross platform toolkit for Oracle which features an SQL worksheet with PL/SQL block parsing, PL/SQL debugger and editor with syntax highlighting, Schema browser, UNICODE support, printing and a full suite of DBA management tools.

Parting Note: In my 9 February Postcards from the Revolution entry I discussed security issues and made a number of recommendations. Among them was a recommendation to incorporate security testing for shrink-wrap and developed software. One source of security testing information that is complete is Donald Firesmith's security testing resource page. Another source of information on the subject is SEI's Engineering Practices page, which is a gateway to survivable systems information, commercial-off-the-shelf software (COTS) considerations, performance-critical systems and other topics that tie into security and architecture.