Ellington

Named after Duke Ellington whose signature tune was "Take the 'A' Train". The song was written about New York City's A train.

Subway Tunnel

Ellington is an architecture for modeling complex business processes.

Ellington is a collection of simple concepts designed to bring discipline, organization, and modularity to a project. (View the slides from the intro talk.)

The nomenclature is taken from New York's subway system. We've found that using cohesive physical metaphors helps people reason more clearly about the complexities of software. The subway analogy isn't perfect but gets pretty close.

Important

The Ellington architecture should only be applied after a good understanding of the problem domain has been established. We recommend spiking a solution to learn your project's requirements and then coming back to Ellington.

Goals

  • Provide a nomenclature simple enough to be shared by engineering and the business team.
  • Establish constraints to ensure that complex projects are easy to manage, develop, and maintain.

Lexicon

  • Conductor - A supervisor responsible for gathering passengers and putting them on a route.
  • Passenger - The stateful context that will be riding the virtual subway.
  • Route - A collection of lines and their connections.
  • Line - A linear track that moves the passenger from point A to point B.
  • Station - A discreet chunk of business logic.
  • State - A status or disposition assigned to the passenger.

Ellington Diagram