Architectural Patterns

Architectural patterns borrow a lot of terminology and concepts from design patterns, but focus on providing re-usable models and methods specifically for the over-all architecture of information systems. This means they are not complete templates like other "design" patterns that can be directly applied to code. Architectural patterns comprise software, hardware, networks, and people as opposed to pure source code.

  • Model View Controller is one of the oldest patterns (SmallTalk-80) and thus very fundamental to software development. MVC separates the concerns regarding data (model) and user interface (view) so that changes to the user interface do not impact the data handling and the data can be reorganized without changing the user interface.


  • Dependency Injection is a relatively new and very complex pattern. Introducing dependency injection into your project may change a lot of the architecture so its wise to plan ahead. To those who think this pattern is a bit "backwards" - well, it is an implementation of the "Inversion of Control - IoC" concept which does exactly that, it inverts the control flow. The name "dependency injection" is actually misleading, the pattern lets you inject not the dependencies themselves of course, but rather the information to satisfy them.