Ian Gorton is a Laboratory Fellow at the Pacific Northwest National Lab in Washington State, USA. He leads multiple projects that create advanced tools and reusable architectures for use in scientific and data analysis applications. Prior to this, he was a member of the Empirical Software Engineering group at National ICT Australia (NICTA), based in Sydney, Australia. In over 20 years of experience, Ian has worked in both academia and industry, and held various senior positions, including Chief Architect, in Government research labs in Australia and the USA. He has also consulted to major organizations including Fujitsu, Borland, the Australian Stock Exchange, IBM and the Australian Tax office, and served as Program Chair for both WICSA and COMPARCH, the two leading international conferences in Software Architecture.

"I'm basically a software {architect, researcher, engineer}. I work on a whole range of projects, including new middleware technology R&D, designing architectures for enterprise applications, and carrying out software architecture research. I guess I must enjoy the variety!"

Job titles like "Technical Architect" and "Chief Architect" nowadays abound in software industry, yet many people suspect that "architecture" is one of the most overused and least understood terms in professional software development.

Gorton's book tries to resolve this dilemma. It concisely describes the essential elements of knowledge and key skills required to be a software architect. The explanations encompass the essentials of architecture thinking, practices, and supporting technologies. They range from a general understanding of structure and quality attributes through technical issues like middleware components and service-oriented architectures to recent technologies like model-driven architecture, software product lines, aspect-oriented design, and the Semantic Web, which will presumably influence future software systems. This second edition contains new material covering enterprise architecture, agile development, enterprise service bus technologies, RESTful Web services, and a case study on how to use the MeDICi integration framework.

All approaches are illustrated by an ongoing real-world example. So if you work as an architect or senior designer (or want to someday), or if you are a student in software engineering, here is a valuable and yet approachable knowledge source for you.