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The full Java life: What does a software architect really do all day?

For the architect who engages, this work is anything but abstract

By Matthew Heusser, JavaWorld.com, 06/03/13

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Software architects have it easy, or so many coders and engineers believe. Find out what an architect's day-to-day working life really looks like in this Full Java life interview. Java programming veteren Bruce Brouwer discusses his approach to upgrading legacy Java web applications to a service-oriented front-end architecture, his rapidly evolving web UI toolkit, and why he generally prefers working with Java's constraints to opting for a less rigorous JVM language.

Like many software developers, I’ve always been skeptical of architects. Too often they seem to make demands about how the work of coding will be done without having to live with the consequences. I'm the guy who once wrote an article called "Why I'm not an architect," and I have been known to quip "His favorite IDE is MS Outlook."

Then I met Bruce Brouwer, an application architect at Gordon Food Service (GFS), a family owned food distributor with offices in Michigan. When I met Bruce, he was deep into his computer screen, looking at actual code. His task was to integrate GFS's Ruby-based Compass compiler into an application build using JRuby, and his approach to the work seemed anything but abstract. I was intrigued.

Bruce's job at GFS, he says, is to both set the vision for future web applications and demonstrate his vision with proof-of-concept applications. He typically works with development teams on the first few implementations of a roll out. The cutting edge issue Bruce was working on, on the day we met, was how to move GFS past traditional request/response web applications into a service-oriented front-end architecture (SOFEA), where all the presentation logic is handled in the browser rather than on the server.

Figure 1. Bruce Brouwer in his office at Gordon Food Service

Bruce shared some of his ideas for pushing beyond classic service-oriented architectures (SOA) into more message-based paradigms. These ideas have to work on paper, but Bruce needs buy-in from the technical teams in order to make them work. As an architect, he provides implementation guidance across teams, technologies, and even legacy systems. His is a fascinating perspective, and one I thought worth sharing.

Matt Heusser: Talk to me about your career as a programmer and architect. How has your role changed over time? How did you approach your role as a junior programmer versus as a mid-career programmer or as an architect today?

Bruce Brouwer: After college I moved into my first real job. From almost the very beginning, I was pushing at the boundaries. There was this tedious process of updating the data access layer of this application. All the new hires were subjected to the pain of working that process. After my first time, I decided to automate it. Management was impressed, so they asked me to run it for all the tables in the database. It took about a week to clean up the mess from my automating what turned out to be a broken process.

As I continued in my career, I found many more opportunities to make things easier to develop. A phrase quickly became associated with me: "One line of code." I kept pushing my work to make things simpler for developers. I wasn't truly happy with my work until you could do something that was previously complicated, but now was as simple as one line of code.

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