difference between architecture /pattern /framework

[Adeel Ansari]

actually i am a bit confused in these terms pattern, architecture, and framework. i need to know the real difference.

i have read in some books "MVC design pattern, MVC framework, MVC architecture". what we really mean when we use MVC with word framework, or MVC with a word Architecture. is there any difference between these three? i m sure there is but i am a bit confused.

[Lasse Koskela]

Architecture is something abstract. Framework is concrete classes and interfaces. I really don't have any particularly good definitions available, but I'm sure someone else around here has.

[Stan James]

My .02 ... these are personal definitions that fit my current professional life ...

Software architecture is a consideration of what kind of "parts" make up some software ... how many they are, how big they are, how they divide or share responsibility, how they communicate, which ones depend on each other. Often if you examine the internals of a part you find another whole architecture. Architecture is an aspect of or a way of looking at design. Every design has an architecture whether you planned it or not, whether it is a one-off or a common design.

Frameworks usually provide a significant amount of default functionality and invite you to plug in your own cutom application bits. A servlet container invites you to write servlets to its specifications, and it calls your servlets when it chooses to. This idea scales all the way down to a little XML parsing framework I made with a single abstract class. You often give up some control to a framework in trade for productivity.

Patterns, per the GoF guys, are "harvested" by observing that similar problems led to similar designs in a number of systems. Patterns may be large and architectural in nature, or small and low-level design in nature or anywhere in between. They give us a common vocabulary for common designs.

Any of that useful? I can't help writing about this stuff, so there is much more
HERE.

[Marlene Miller]

re: architecture

http://martinfowler.com/ieeeSoftware/whoNeedsArchitect.pdf
Who needs an architect?

What is architecture, and who exactly is an architect? These are questions that seem to get everyone very heated. So in this IEEE Software column, I let Ralph Johnson explain about architecture: with a definition that matches all others in a way that nobody agrees with. I also talk about two sub-species of architect: Architectus Reloadus and Architectus Oryzus. http://www.martinfowler.com/articles.html

----
re: framework

1. An Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming by Timothy Budd, Chapter 21 Frameworks

2. Object-Oriented Design and Patterns by Cay Horstmann, Chapter 8 Frameworks

 -----------
|   Main    |             User-Supplied
|   Program |                  Code
 -----------
 |    |    |
+-+  +-+  +-+
| |  | |  | |              Library Code
+-+  +-+  +-+
 
 -----------
| Framework |             Framework
|           |              Library 
 -----------
 |    |    |
+-+  +-+  +-+
| |  | |  | |             User-Supplied
+-+  +-+  +-+                Code

A framework inverts the relationship between the code of the application developer and the library code.

1. A framework supplies a set of classes that implements services common to a certain type of application. The programmer-user of the framework augments the framework to build a specific application, often forming subclasses of the framework classes.

2. In a framework, the framework classes, not the application-specific classes, control the flow of execution.

Unlike a design pattern, a framework is not a general design rule. It consists of classes that provide functionality in a particular domain. Typically, a framework uses multiple patterns.

(extracted from the references above)
[ August 27, 2004: Message edited by: Marlene Miller ]

[Peter den Haan]

A slightly different way to put it: the difference between a library and a framework is the Hollywood principle: "Don't call us, we'll call you". If you're calling other code to do the work, you're using a library. If you're implementing callbacks for other code, you're using a framework.

Of course it's not quite as black and white as that. Virtually any framework also has library-style code in, and many libraries use callbacks too (eg FilenameFilter in the JDK), but it's not the backbone of the API.

- Peter

[Adeel Ansari]

thanx buddies. you people did alot. i got it enough, for more i'll go for the references mentioned.
thanx