I am not taking this seriously at all, but I have felt the need over the last few weekends to spend an hour at a time putting a summary of my REST thinking together. I have only made a very basic start at present, and don't really intend to push the whole thing to any kind of logical conclusion. However, here it is for those who might be interested:
At present I am just treating it as an extended blog entry and am not looking for a publisher. Unfortunately, I don't think I have the time to devote to making this book happen for real. However, expect the occasional update over time.
An excerpt:
A number of characteristics distinguish an enterprise architecture from simply an architecture for a business:
- Different parts of the architecture are owned by different parts of an organisation, or by completely different organisations
- Whole-architecture upgrades are technically or socially infeasible
- Architectural decisions are made by consensus between participating organisations
- Downtime for many or all architecture components is costly
- The architecture must yield high performance compared to asset costs, real estate, power, network bandwidth, administration, and other expenses
- The architecture is distributed geographically, introducing bandwidth and latency limitations
The characteristics I have chosen to define an enterprise architecture are also characteristics of the World-Wide Web.
Benjamin