Architecture on Valentine's Day

I attended the Australian Computer Society (South Australian Branch) Architecture SIG this week. It happened that this was on Valentines Day. This drew a few comments about our dedication to the craft of IT Architecture, as we chose to spend the evening talking about architecture rather than with our chosen partners.

There were two presentations. Paul Turner introduced the International Association of Software Architects (IASA) to us. They have just set up chapter in Adelaide and will associate with our Architecture SIG.

IASA is an international professional society for Architects. It provides standards, training, certification and advocacy for Software Architects. Paul discussed some fundamental questions such as:

• What is an architect?
• What is software architecture?
• How can yo prove you are a software architect?

Paul explained how IASA could help answer some of these questions. The main item of interest for me is that one can now be certified as an Architect. You pay for training over a number of months and then get grilled by a board which determines whether you have made the grade. This is an interesting development and will provide some legitimacy to the role and credentials of a software architect.

Adam Davies then gave a demonstration of Ruby on Rails. I had previously heard much about this technology but had not seen it in action. It was a very competent demonstration and it was amazing how much Adam was able to put together in the course the demonstration without resorting to the "here is some code I prepared earlier" fallback. Rails is able to set up sensible defaults to field names, column names and object names and create mappings between these without much overhead. It seemed to be ideal for standalone applications but certainly had some features that would make it valuable in any software development environment.