Ellington

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

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.

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

Goals

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

Start Here

• Skim the intro slides on Speaker Deck.
• Review one of the example apps.

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.

Note: We recommend Ellington for projects where a good understanding of the problem domain has been established. You might want to spike a solution to learn your project's requirements before using Ellington.