Goals

As TopCoder's component catalog has grown, it has become clear that design standards and practices need to be developed to ensure interoperation between components, and to ensure that application architecture effectively utilizes these components.

To this end, we are going to test building these standards with the community, via the wiki.

Current Status

These areas have some version of standardization in progress:

• Exception Management — The objective of this page is to establish architectural best practices for TopCoder component exception management, to be reflected in future components and to be factored into existing components.
• Configuration Management — The objective of this page is to establish architectural best practices for TopCoder component configuration management, to be reflected in future components and to be factored into existing components.
• Persistence — The objective of this page is to establish architectural best practices for TopCoder component persistence, to be reflected in future components and to be factored into existing components.

Documentation

This page defines the basic standard for our standards! Our standards must identify the following areas:

• Objective - the general objective of the document.
• Status - the current status of the document. All current standards are working drafts.
• Requirements - the basic requirements for the standards document.
• Requirements Discussion - a detailed discussion of any important factors in the requirements.
• Recommendations - recommended standards per the draft. These will become the standards when the draft is finalized.
• Open Issues - items that need to be added to document.
• Definitions - terms used in the document that may not be common knowledge.

See Also

The Suggested Component Standards and Practices page - for ideas about future standards.