About ObjectiveView

First published in 1996, ObjectiveView is - both currenly and historically - a not-for-profit 'software community' style venture; authors, contributors, advisors and production giving their time free of charge.

Although ObjectiveView is not 'source-code', it is produced in the same 'spirit' as the many of the great open source free software contributions out there. Promotional items are limited to non-invasive material supporting authors, contributors and sometimes distribution partners.

Authors and Contributors

ObjectiveView's authors/contributors include, amongst others:

• Grady Booch - creator of UML,
• Scott Ambler - creator of Discplined Agile and Agile Data expert,
• Ralph Johnson - author of 'Design Patterns',
• Robert C. Martin - creator/populariser of the SOLID principles, software architecture innovator and Agile Alliance founder,
• Kent Beck - creator of Extreme Programming and Agile Alliance founder,
• Kevlin Henney - prolific conference speaker and expert in software education,
• Doug Rosenberg - creater of the Iconix use case based agile development process,
• Pramod Savalage - co-author (with Martin Fowler) of the definitive introduction to NoSQL databases,
• and many more...

Why read ObjectiveView?

ObjectiveView is an ezine targetted towards professional software engineers who take their craft seriously, who realise there is always something to learn - and who aren't frightened of having their opinions challenged on occasion. Our readers tend to seek justification by asking why? - rather than just following the herd.

Article Genres

Articles most often fall into one of the following categories

• Solid (pun intended) introductions: reliable overviews of software development related topics (tools, frameworks, libraries, languages, paradigms, design approaches...) with curated links to additional materials where applicable.
• Software architecture and design: Often timeless articles, and very often transferrable across a variety of technologies, programming languages, paradigms, styles, and approaches to development. Underlying principles.
• Probing interviews with key influencers in the software development industry: some well known; some less so. Their work has often had a wide impact on those in the know, though they themselves may be less known.
• Retrospectives: Perhaps unusual in today's 'newer is better' software development world, these types of articles cover the sometimes surprising roots of modern tools, languages, and development approaches.
• and finally, opinion pieces: well reasoned arguments that may go against the it's popular so it must be good approach to technology decision making. The type of thing you're unlikely to find elsewhere!

A Brief History of Time (wrt: ObjectiveView)

ObjectiveView was first published in as a paper magazine in 1996. As the internet area began, publication switched to online - in PDF format, each issue having five or six in depth articles often around one or two core topics. However this approach proved limiting in terms of production frequency, so in 2022 ObjectiveView moved to a web site format.

Articles are now provided online in HTML (web page), PDF and EPUB formats. That's ALL articles]; ah - the benefits of a continuous delivery pipeline.

Licence Details

Please see Licence Details for full details and exceptions.

Production

ObjectiveView would not be possible without the technical expertise and advice of Kevlin Henney and Scott Ambler - who act as the 'technical board' for the publication. The production process, for those interested, involves a variety of tools in the Linux/Ubuntu environment:

• Pug/CSS for page layout
• Typescript for in-page (pug based as part of the site build process) automated content generation,
• Javascript/Typescript for client (browser) side code.
• Make (Linux build control tool) to manage the build dependencies and overall build process.
• Pandoc for conversion between formats - in particular HTML to MD, PDF and EPUB.
• and... a fair bit of Bash scripting - to enable 'continuous delivery' to the live website.