[ajug-members] If you were interviewing a Java architect...

[douglas at morganatlanta.com]

Check out the International Association of Software Architects http://www.iasahome.org/web/home/home

If you can understand just a small portion of what people talk about on that site, you'll do fine.

Just kidding.  Sort of.  I had the title of Chief Architect for a large software company and didn't understand half of it.  Mostly because half of it solves problems I didn't have, and you probably don't have in your area of applications.  Knowing which half is important to you is part of what being a good architect is all about.  Maybe you just don't need SOA for your thing, but you should know what SOA stands for and when you might need it.

To move from being a developer to being an architect you need to understand the various patterns that cut across applications in your domain.  Note the "in your domain" part.  This generally requires some specialization, so don't feel too bad if you don't have much experience with EJBs.  Have you developed state management and secuirty frameworks for JSP/Struts/JSF?  That's architecture and just as complex and difficult as what you'll do in EJBs.  Besides, EJBs are out of date, it's all Spring and Hibernate these days.  Actually, that was last year.  It's probably something else by now...

The things I found useful were books on patterns (Design Patterns, Patterns of Enterprise Architectures) and digging into the code behind some of the popular frameworks.  This is a way to review really smart peoples' work.  Ask yourself questions like what does Spring/Hibernate/JSF/NextBigThing really do?  What problems with the earlier method were they trying to solve?  What tradeoffs did the designers make?  Why did they choose to do it that way?  Why are people ditching EJB for Spring/Hibernate?  Why do some otherwise reasonable people prefer .NET over J2EE?  What's this Ruby thing all about?  Where is that useful?  In what situations would an ESB be useful?  How might using JSF instead of Struts help an organization?  If you had an application with 500 configuration options and you had to manage 50 different installations of the application, how might you want to store and manage the individual installation's options?  How would you make your application agnostic as to
 how you stored those options?  What if you had to create a second, third or fourth application with similar characteristics, would that change your answer?  If you had to regularly share security credentials with other applications for single sign on, and none of those applications followed any standard for what those credentials were and how that would be handed back and forth, how might you want to design your application's handling of security credentials?  (those were a couple of my problems, not necessarily one you'd run into).  If you could stand up at the white board in an interview and answer questions like that you'd do fine.  

Oh, and to be a really good architect you have to be a really good developer first, so all requirements for that job apply as well.
 
Douglas Morgan, Ph.D. 
President 
Breakpoint LLC 
Suite 100 
1217 Bellaire Drive 
Atlanta, GA 30319 
404.316.8451 phone 
866.308.3261 fax 
doug.morgan at breakpointllc.com



----- Original Message ----
From: Parna Hiram <parna.hiram at gmail.com>
To: ajug-members at ajug.org
Sent: Wednesday, February 7, 2007 9:32:14 AM
Subject: [ajug-members] If you were interviewing a Java architect...

What questions would you ask?

I'm looking to step up to the next level. I have years of Java experience but have stayed mainly in developer roles officially. However, I'd like to pursue a position as an architect. I feel I have served from time to time as this role for our group, but nothing seriously substantial over time. 

If you were hiring a Java architect, what questions would you ask? What would be important? What would capture your attention in a good way? In a bad way? What are the absolute minimum requirements?

Additionally, most of my time has been spent on the Servlet/JSP world...not so much on the EJB side. What might I do to shore up my experience on this end? 

Finally, is there a required reading list?

Thanks!

Kind regards,
Parna

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