Abstractions for software architecture and tools to support them

Abstract

Architectures for software use rich abstractions and idioms to describe system components, the nature of interactions among the components, and the patterns that guide the composition of components into systems. These abstractions are higher level than the elements usually supported by programming languages and tools. They capture packaging and interaction issues as well as computational functionality. Well-established (if informal) patterns guide architectural design of systems. We sketch a model for defining architectures and present an implementation of the basic level of that model. Our purpose is to support the abstractions used in practice by software designers. The implementation provides a testbed for experiments with a variety of system construction mechanisms. It distinguishes among different types of components and different ways these components can interact. It supports abstract interactions such as data flow and scheduling on the same footing as simple procedure call. It can express and check appropriate compatibility restrlctions and configuration constraints. It accepts existing code as components, incurring no runtime overhead after initialization. It allows easy incorporation of specifications and associated analysis tools developed elsewhere. The implementation provides a base for extending the notation and validating the model.

Software Design and Architecture The once and future focus of software engineering

“…[66,73]), though the term is decades older (it is found, for instance, in many works from the early 70's). Work in the 90's was initially focused largely on matters of design representation [56], though the whole movement could be characterized by a desire to provide substance, structure, and specificity to the historic field of software design.…”

Specifying Software Architectures Using a Formal-Based Approach

“…However, Darwin does not have strong support for architecture abstraction or connectors. UniCon [10] emphasises the structural aspects of executable software systems. It is actually a compiler and provides matching from implementation code to the architecture.…”

A brief summary of VSPEC

“…Some of the more well known architecture description are UniCon [23], Wright [24,25] and Rapide [26,27]. Each of these languages allow the definition of components and connectors to define a software architecture.…”