The affinity Platform: Modular Architecture based on Independent Components (S)

Abstract

This paper presents the Affinity Platform, a plugin platform for developing software systems centered around the idea of Independent Components. "Independent" refers to the ability of a plugin to run on a machine not just as part of a software system but also on its own. This way, software systems can be built out of chains of Independent Components, making it easier to partially reuse their Components and also to extend these systems in the future. The Affinity Platform uses a graphical user interface to represent a software system in the shape of a diagram. By analyzing this diagram, it can generate linking scripts for Components. The Affinity architecture also facilitates the development of distributed and parallel software systems, as Components are capable of operating independently on different threads and machines. The Affinity Platform was used in the development of an emotion recognition application in a multimodal setup running on a mobile and resource-scarce medium. In this scenario, the strongest points of the platform were the ability to offload code to other machines, the ease of adapting the system to different sensor setups, and the convenience of developing Components individually and only having to connect them at the end.