Making Memories (Beautiful Architecture - Chapter 4)

Making Memories was a fairly simple read (for the most part) describing the process used by a professional portrait studio from initial photo shoot to the product being delivered to the customer. Due to the disparate locations of these studios, many locations do not have adequate space or staff to handle the process of developing and/or printing the various sizes of photos. The idea is to let the photographers (associates) do what they do best -- create beautiful images.

The author mentions a couple of different of patterns from the Gang of Four's book, Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software.

Chain of Responsibility
Facade
Visitor

Since I do not get daily exposure to the patterns, I had to go back and review in order to refresh this degrading brain of mine. An unknown pattern to me, leader-follower, was also utilized in the design. Other patterns can also be inferred based on some the concepts applied and approaches taken by the development team.

The contributor mentions the StudioServer walks through the orders collecting GUIDs using the controversial Visitor pattern. What makes this specific pattern controversial?

I may be publicly announcing some of my shortcomings, but I have not had any exposure to Hibernate and Spring. Maybe it is due to the size and age of some of the software projects in which I am involved that prevents me from applying these concepts in my daily job. What are some of the benefits of using these frameworks?

It is interesting how the development managed to develop methods for providing database updates remotely without requiring the associate to perform the upgrade. The last thing you want to do is have a non-techie hopping around in your database with the root account.

At the photo studios, the team threw around the idea of a peer-to-peer network but ultimately decided on a multi-threaded client-server model with a RAID set and additional storage device for the customers' images (ie. image repository). This helped in making the workstations interchangeable.

There were numerous concepts for design, development, testing, delivery, and maintenance discussed in this 25-page chapter. I recommend the read for anyone interested in relating to different issues the development team ran into and how they worked around the obstacles while devising some intelligent design choices.