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As I briefly mentioned a couple of days ago, I attended the architecture summit last week - an event organised by Alexis Richardson (founder of Monadic and MetaLogic), Rod Johnson (Spring), Floyd Marinescu (founder of TheServerSide.com), Steve Ross-Talbot (a W3C chair), and John Davies (a financial services expert, C24). With so much confusion about how to architect, design and build enterprise applications, the purpose of the summit was to start a process that will lead to the creation of an architecture manifesto, which will help architects better build real-world solutions in the future.

Clearly, getting the industry to agree on a prescriptive set of guidelines is (proabably!) never going to work, so a different approach has been taken. Over the next few months, as a part of the manifesto, we're planning to publish the following.

• Fallacies : some of the fallacies associated with enterprise development and distributed computing.
• Definitions : definitions of the (often misunderstood) terms that are important to us as architects.
• Principles : key principles that are important when building enterprise systems.

I could only attend about half of the summit, but it was a great event where everybody was able to contribute and learn something from the group. One of the key differentiators of this event was that everybody around the table was a leading practitioner in their field - genuinely smart people ranging from architects at major investment banks to representatives from leading product vendors. As somebody performing a full-time architect role at the moment, I personally found the discussion very relevant and it was interesting to see a whole bunch of (mostly) Java experts presenting their key principles without mentioning the "J" word. Keep an eye out for this stuff ... the next few months should be very interesting. In the meantime, Cameron Purdy and Phil Wainewright both have short writeups of the summit.

p.s. if you've read too busy to blog, the summit was responsible for another late night ;-)