The Architecture of Open Source Applications

Mikes Notes

The latest Quastor engineering newsletter included a link to these free books, which teach software architecture using practical open-source examples.

Resources

• The Architecture of Open Source Applications
• Software Design by Example in Python
• Software Design by Example in JavaScript

Article

Architects look at thousands of buildings during their training, and study critiques of those buildings written by masters. In contrast, most software developers only ever get to know a handful of large programs well—usually programs they wrote themselves—and never study the great programs of history. As a result, they repeat one another's mistakes rather than building on one another's successes.

Our goal is to change that. In these two books, the authors of four dozen open source applications explain how their software is structured, and why. What are each program's major components? How do they interact? And what did their builders learn during their development? In answering these questions, the contributors to these books provide unique insights into how they think.

If you are a junior developer, and want to learn how your more experienced colleagues think, these books are the place to start. If you are an intermediate or senior developer, and want to see how your peers have solved hard design problems, these books can help you too. - AOSA

AOSA Volume 1

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	Introduction	Amy Brown and Greg Wilson
1.	Asterisk	Russell Bryant
2.	Audacity	James Crook
3.	The Bourne-Again Shell	Chet Ramey
4.	Berkeley DB	Margo Seltzer and Keith Bostic
5.	CMake	Bill Hoffman and Kenneth Martin
6.	Eclipse	Kim Moir
7.	Graphite	Chris Davis
8.	The Hadoop Distributed File System	Robert Chansler, Hairong Kuang, Sanjay Radia, Konstantin Shvachko, and Suresh Srinivas
9.	Continuous Integration	C. Titus Brown and Rosangela Canino-Koning
10.	Jitsi	Emil Ivov
11.	LLVM	Chris Lattner
12.	Mercurial	Dirkjan Ochtman
13.	The NoSQL Ecosystem	Adam Marcus
14.	Python Packaging	Tarek Ziadé
15.	Riak and Erlang/OTP	Francesco Cesarini, Andy Gross, and Justin Sheehy
16.	Selenium WebDriver	Simon Stewart
17.	Sendmail	Eric Allman
18.	SnowFlock	Roy Bryant and Andrés Lagar-Cavilla
19.	SocialCalc	Audrey Tang
20.	Telepathy	Danielle Madeley
21.	Thousand Parsec	Alan Laudicina and Aaron Mavrinac
22.	Violet	Cay Horstmann
23.	VisTrails	Juliana Freire, David Koop, Emanuele Santos, Carlos Scheidegger, Claudio Silva, and Huy T. Vo
24.	VTK	Berk Geveci and Will Schroeder
25.	Battle For Wesnoth	Richard Shimooka and David White
	Bibliography

AOSA Volume 2

Buy Volume II

	Introduction	Amy Brown and Greg Wilson
1.	Scalable Web Architecture and Distributed Systems	Kate Matsudaira
2.	Firefox Release Engineering	Chris AtLee, Lukas Blakk, John O'Duinn, and Armen Zambrano Gasparnian
3.	FreeRTOS	Christopher Svec
4.	GDB	Stan Shebs
5.	The Glasgow Haskell Compiler	Simon Marlow and Simon Peyton-Jones
6.	Git	Susan Potter
7.	GPSD	Eric Raymond
8.	The Dynamic Language Runtime and the Iron Languages	Jeff Hardy
9.	ITK	Luis Ibanez and Brad King
10.	GNU Mailman	Barry Warsaw
11.	matplotlib	John Hunter and Michael Droettboom
12.	MediaWiki	Sumana Harihareswara and Guillaume Paumier
13.	Moodle	Tim Hunt
14.	nginx	Andrey Alexeev
15.	Open MPI	Jeff Squyres
16.	OSCAR	Jennifer Ruttan
17.	Processing.js	Mike Kamermans
18.	Puppet	Luke Kanies
19.	PyPy	Benjamin Peterson
20.	SQLAlchemy	Michael Bayer
21.	Twisted	Jessica McKellar
22.	Yesod	Michael Snoyman
23.	Yocto	Elizabeth Flanagan
24.	ZeroMQ	Martin Sústrik
	Bibliography

The Performance of Open Source Applications

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	Introduction	Tavish Armstrong
1	High Performance Networking in Chrome	Ilya Grigorik
2	From SocialCalc to EtherCalc	Audrey Tang
3	Ninja	Evan Martin
4	Parsing XML at the Speed of Light	Arseny Kapoulkine
5	MemShrink	Kyle Huey
6	Applying Optimization Principle Patterns to Component Deployment and Configuration Tools	Doug C. Schmidt, William R. Otte, and Aniruddha Gokhale
7	Infinispan	Manik Surtani
8	Talos	Clint Talbert and Joel Maher
9	Zotonic	Arjan Scherpenisse and Marc Worrell
10	Secrets of Mobile Network Performance	Bryce Howard
11	Warp	Kazu Yamamoto, Michael Snoyman, and Andreas Voellmy
12	Working with Big Data in Bioinformatics	Eric McDonald and C. Titus Brown

500 Lines or Less

Buy 500 Lines

	Introduction	Michael DiBernardo
1	Blockcode: A visual programming toolkit	Dethe Elza
2	A Continuous Integration System	Malini Das
3	Clustering by Consensus	Dustin J. Mitchell
4	Contingent: A Fully Dynamic Build System	Brandon Rhodes and Daniel Rocco
5	A Web Crawler With asyncio Coroutines	A. Jesse Jiryu Davis and Guido van Rossum
6	Dagoba: an in-memory graph database	Dann Toliver
7	DBDB: Dog Bed Database	Taavi Burns
8	An Event-Driven Web Framework	Leo Zovic
9	A Flow Shop Scheduler	Dr. Christian Muise
10	An Archaeology-Inspired Database	Yoav Rubin
11	Making Your Own Image Filters	Cate Huston
12	A Python Interpreter Written in Python	Allison Kaptur
13	A 3D Modeller	Erick Dransch
14	A Simple Object Model	Carl Friedrich Bolz
15	Optical Character Recognition (OCR)	Marina Samuel
16	A Pedometer in the Real World	Dessy Daskalov
17	The Same-Origin Policy	Eunsuk Kang, Santiago Perez De Rosso, and Daniel Jackson
18	A Rejection Sampler	Jessica B. Hamrick
19	Web Spreadsheet	Audrey Tang
20	Static Analysis	Leah Hanson
21	A Template Engine	Ned Batchelder
22	A Simple Web Server	Greg Wilson

License and Royalties

This work is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. Please see the full description of the license for details. All royalties from sales of these books will be donated to Amnesty International.

Contributing

Dozens of volunteers worked hard to create this book, but there is still lots to do. You can help by reporting errors, by helping to translate the content into other languages and formats, or by describing the architecture of other open source projects. Please contact us the coordinators for various translations listed below, or mail us directly at gvwilson@third-bit.com if you would like to start a new translation or write a chapter yourself.