An Introduction to VISTA Architecture

On Tuesday at 1:00 p.m. PDT I gave my first webinar, An Introduction to VISTA Architecture. It was in support of Fabián Lopez's webinar series for his VISTA Extensions Hub website, www.vxvista.org. It's the first in a series of webinars we'll be doing together, most of which will be about VISTA architecture, software lifecycle, and policy and planning.

This first webinar focused on a new diagram depicting the layers of VISTA's architecture. This is a great grand-child of Tom Munnecke and George Timson's original Onion Diagram, which they drew on a napkin back in 1978 when they were first planning VISTA's architecture.

Where later onion diagrams developed by VA have increasingly emphasized VISTA's architecture as being constructed of plug-in packages, Tom and George's original diagram was trying to capture the idea of a health-information space, in which a small set of carefully thought out initial conditions would provide all the organization necessary for large numbers of autonomous developers working on their own could nevertheless create a coherent organic architecture. This is the same model used to build the Internet, and it is just about the opposite of the command-and-control model VA had been using up until then to try to do software development.