If you are thinking of designing an application, then having set patterns or techniques can help you unfailingly tend to create well-structured products. One technique is application design architecture, which can improve your front-end and back-end development processes. Understanding application architecture can help you improve the functionality and user experience of your applications.
By the time a user logs on to this desktop, laptop, or mobile, opens a browser, and types the name of a website, the browser displays the required information and the user acts on the site. Have you ever wondered how is it that computers retrieve this information and what happens in the background? Well, the truth is that an underlying application design architecture is the activity that makes all this process possible.
Basics of Application Design Architecture
Application design architecture is a structural map that provides a guide for how to create software applications. This system defines how apps interact with one another to meet a client's requirements. This structure comprises software modules, components, systems, and the various interactions among them. Application architecture uses front and back-end development. Front-end development focuses on the users' experience. On the other hand, the back end focuses on the systems that power the application. An architecture can help developers ensure an application is scalable, trustworthy, and functional.
Application design architecture can indeed define how your software interacts with databases and middleware. These interactions confirm your application can scale to meet increasing business demands and user requirements while maintaining stable processes. A developer might use a variety of programming languages, like JavaScript, CSS, or HTML. Application architecture is essential because it helps organizations implement modern software development to deliver valuable products effectively while saving time and money.
The 3 Components of Application Design Architecture
In this part, we will take care of describing the three elements that make application design architecture something possible.
1. Web Browser
Browsers, clients, or front-end components are responsible for interacting with users, receiving input, managing presentation logic, and controlling user interactions with applications. User inputs are validated as well if needed.
2) Web Server
The web server also known as the backend component or the server-side component manages the business logic and processes the user requests by routing the requests to the right component and managing the entire app operations. It can run and oversee requests from a wide variety of clients.
3) Database Server
The database server delivers the required data for the app. It handles data-related tasks. In a multi-tiered architecture, database servers can handle business logic with the help of stored procedures.
5 Types of Application Design Architecture
In this section, we will discuss some of the principal types of application design architecture.
1. Component-based Development
Component-based development is a development model that concentrates on building applications based on reusable pieces. You make these applications with components, or grouped software modules, that you separate from one another to avoid dependencies between different modules or libraries. You often create the separation among different entities so you can develop and deploy each module separately from other modules.
CBDs display lower development costs, shorter development timescales, and the capability to reuse large amounts of existing code. CBDs maintain and offer increased flexibility. These benefits come from the modular architecture of CBDs, which splits applications into smaller units so they are more flexible through the addition or removal of software components. For instance, in some CBDs, it may be necessary to move or remove certain components to upgrade software versions.
2. Service-based Architecture
Service-based architectures involve a centralized system design model with a remote interface for every application to interact with services. This system architecture comes from a well-defined service-oriented network architecture. SBA is an application model that focuses on the design and implementation of applications to promote the delivery of services.
It is a well-defined strategy for building enterprise applications using services as the basis for application development instead of client-server architectures. SBA creates application interfaces that allow services to take over the responsibilities of less complex components, such as handling data manipulation or other often repeated operations.
3. Unified Modeling Language
UML is a graphical modeling tool used to study and display the design of a system. It provides a common language for all software teams by providing methodologies, modeling strategies, and techniques for classifying objects, interactions, procedures, event handling, and state machines. You can use UML diagrams to illustrate a system design or structure visually that you can share among team members. UMLs provide a way to organize the requirements of a project into jobs by mapping them with universal representations.
4. Progressive App Architecture
A progressive web app architecture refers to a type of app development that focuses on how the application works on different devices or with different Internet browsers. This approach differs from traditional software development, where developers often create applications that are tailor-made to one platform. This new approach allows you to implement web applications that work on any device, browser, and operating system through changes in JavaScript, HTML, and CSS code.
5. Single-page Application Architecture
Web applications that use only one page to display all the information necessary for them to perform their tasks or to complete their tasks are called single-page applications. There are many ways to use it, from simple forms to advertisements, coupons, search results, and news articles. SPA allows you to assemble complex web applications where you can portray multiple pages with different information in the same web browser. This application design approach is less expensive than using separate applications.
Bottom Line
Application design architecture cannot be separated from the overall success of a well-thought design. So you should be more careful about what you do with your application design architecture.
