Layering Strategies
by Peter Eeles. All Rights Reserved.
Peter Eeles is a Technical Lead in Rational's Regional Services Organization,
based in the UK. He has spent the majority of his 16 year career developing
large-scale distributed systems and, in 1998, co-authored his first book,
"Building Business Objects". A regular speaker at conferences
throughout Europe, Peter spends most of his time consulting in software
architecture, and in helping organization adopt the Rational Unified Process. He
lives in the UK with his wife, Karen, and sons Daniel, Thomas and Christopher.
Peter can be reached via e-mail at peter.eeles@rational.com.
.
A PDF version
of this article is available, however, have
Adobe Acrobat
installed to view it.
Abstract
A number of techniques exist for decomposing software systems. Layering is
one example and is described in this paper. Such techniques address two main
concerns: most systems are too complex to comprehend in their entirety, and
different perspectives of a system are required for different audiences.
Layering has been adopted
in numerous software systems, and is espoused in many texts and also in the
Rational Unified Process (RUP). However, layering is often misunderstood and
incorrectly applied. This paper clarifies what is meant be layering, and
discusses the impact of applying different layering strategies.
| 