software engineering Software engineering is a systematic engineering approach to software development. A software engineer is a person who applies the principles of software engineering to design, develop, maintain, test, and evaluate computer software. The term '' ...

, a Library Oriented Architecture (LOA) is a set of principles and methodologies for designing and developing software in the form of reusable software libraries constrained in a specific ontology domain. LOA provides one of the many alternate methodologies that enable the further exposure of software through a service-oriented architecture. Library orientation dictates the ontological boundaries of a library that exposes business functionality through a set of public APIs. Library Oriented Architecture further promotes practices similar to Modular Programming, and encourages the maintenance of internal libraries and modules with independent internal open-source life-cycles. This approach promotes good software engineering principles and patterns such as separation of concerns and designing to

interfaces Interface or interfacing may refer to: Academic journals * Interface (journal), ''Interface'' (journal), by the Electrochemical Society * ''Interface, Journal of Applied Linguistics'', now merged with ''ITL International Journal of Applied Lin ...

as opposed to implementations.

Principles

Three principles rule Library Oriented Architecture frameworks: # A

software library In computer science, a library is a collection of non-volatile resources used by computer programs, often for software development. These may include configuration data, documentation, help data, message templates, pre-written code and subr ...

implementation and subject area expertise must be constrained to only one ontology domain. # A software library that needs to use concepts and artifacts from a different ontology domain than the one it belongs to, must interface and reuse the library corresponding to that specific ontology domain. # All domain specific software libraries must be maintained and supported with separate life-cycles.

Benefits

Library Oriented Architecture may provide different process improvements to existing software engineering practices and software development life-cycle. Some tangible benefits from its adoption are: # Simplify

configuration management Configuration management (CM) is a process for establishing and maintaining consistency of a product's performance, functional, and physical attributes with its requirements, design, and operational information throughout its life. The CM proc ...

of distributed systems. # Build highly reliable software systems because of the inherent properties and constraints of the LOA principles. #

Information Systems An information system (IS) is a formal, sociotechnical, organizational system designed to collect, process, information storage, store, and information distribution, distribute information. From a sociotechnical perspective, information systems a ...

built using LOA are technology-independent. These systems can easily replace or swap entire libraries and domain implementations with localized impact and minimal upstream ripple effect. # Increase the Maintainability Index of your distributed systems and integration repositories. # Minimize the risk of high coupling, this can be more evident on large enterprise systems. # Bring developers up to speed orders of magnitude more quickly than a traditional system. Move developers and teams across libraries and domain ontologies and collaborate seamlessly. # Spot bugs and zero-in on the problem almost instantly. There is something to be said about the amount of time a developer spends debugging. # Maximization of the

Bus Factor The bus factor is a measurement of the risk resulting from information and capabilities not being shared among team members, derived from the phrase "in case they get hit by a bus". It is also known as the bus problem, lottery factor, truck factor, ...

of the software engineering team.

References

{{reflist Software architecture Enterprise application integration

Principles

Benefits

See also

References