Rethinking web architecture

Last year I was a speaker at NDC for the first time, and I’m proud to again have been given the opportunity at this years NDC. The presentation this year is titled: “When less is more – Agile web architecture”, and I did together with Jonas Follesø.

Rethinking thinking

Rather than talking about rethinking web architecture, we are actually talking about rethinking our thinking and practices when designing web architecture. So, although we do give a concrete example, this is not the one new architecture. The main points we’re trying to convey is that you should keep it simple (often much simpler than we normally do) and that architecture should evolve (adding only when you have to, when you have to). The example shows one way of doing that.

Growing architecture

Letting software and architecture grow as we learn is for me simply being agile, but my experience tells me that although most of us consider ourselves agile, we have a hard time wrapping our heads around what that actually means when it comes to architecture. Being agile when it comes to architecture, and being able to grow good architecture takes a lot of skill and knowledge, and let it be clear that when we talk about simplicity we do not say throw away everything. We say reflect on every choice you make.

Developer productivity

Our presentation also take a critical look at the typical three layer architecture which, a bit to my surprise, was known and used by almost everyone in the audience. The critique is mostly about productivity, or rather the lack of it. Pushing data through such an architecture is often a pretty costly affair. An interesting point is also that with this architecture we violate the DRY principle at least ten times for every piece of information in the system (that is stored in the database). I spend a few minutes explaining that one. Have a look yourself.

Some of the feedback we got after the presentation suggests that this talk have sparked a few discussions. That is great!

You can watch the presentation here.

The NDC 2011 website is here.

- Tore Vestues