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A classification and comparison framework for software architecture description languages
- IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
, 2000
"... Software architectures shift the focus of developers from lines-of-code to coarser-grained architectural elements and their overall interconnection structure. Architecture description languages (ADLs) have been proposed as modeling notations to support architecture-based development. There is, howev ..."
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Cited by 840 (59 self)
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Software architectures shift the focus of developers from lines-of-code to coarser-grained architectural elements and their overall interconnection structure. Architecture description languages (ADLs) have been proposed as modeling notations to support architecture-based development. There is, however, little consensus in the research community on what is an ADL, what aspects of an architecture should be modeled in an ADL, and which of several possible ADLs is best suited for a particular problem. Furthermore, the distinction is rarely made between ADLs on one hand and formal specification, module interconnection, simulation, and programming languages on the other. This paper attempts to provide an answer to these questions. It motivates and presents a definition and a classification framework for ADLs. The utility of the definition is demonstrated by using it to differentiate ADLs from other modeling notations. The framework is used to classify and compare several existing ADLs, enabling us in the process to identify key properties of ADLs. The comparison highlights areas where existing ADLs provide extensive support and those in which they are deficient, suggesting a research agenda for the future.
Principled design of the modern web architecture
- ACM Trans. Internet Techn
"... The World Wide Web has succeeded in large part because its software architecture has been designed to meet the needs of an Internet-scale distributed hypermedia system. The modern Web architecture emphasizes scalability of component interactions, generality of interfaces, independent deployment of c ..."
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Cited by 507 (14 self)
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The World Wide Web has succeeded in large part because its software architecture has been designed to meet the needs of an Internet-scale distributed hypermedia system. The modern Web architecture emphasizes scalability of component interactions, generality of interfaces, independent deployment of components, and intermediary components to reduce interaction latency, enforce security, and encapsulate legacy systems. In this paper, we introduce the Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style, developed as an abstract model of the Web architecture to guide our redesign and definition of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol and Uniform Resource Identifiers. We describe the software engineering principles guiding REST and the interaction constraints chosen to retain those principles, contrasting them to the constraints of other architectural styles. We then compare the abstract model to the currently deployed Web architecture in order to elicit mismatches between the existing protocols and the applications they are intended to support.
Specifying Distributed Software Architectures
, 1995
"... There is a real need for clear and sound design specifications of distributed systems at the architectural level. This is the level of the design which deals with the high-level organisation of computational elements and the interactions between those elements. The paper presents the Darwin notation ..."
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Cited by 427 (23 self)
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There is a real need for clear and sound design specifications of distributed systems at the architectural level. This is the level of the design which deals with the high-level organisation of computational elements and the interactions between those elements. The paper presents the Darwin notation for specifying this high-level organisation. Darwin is in essence a declarative binding language which can be used to define hierarchic compositions of interconnected components. Distribution is dealt with orthogonally to system structuring. The language supports the specification of both static structures and dynamic structures which may evolve during execution. The central abstractions managed by Darwin are components and services. Services are the means by which components interact. In addition to its use in specifying the architecture of a distributed system, Darwin has an operational semantics for the elaboration of specifications such that they may be used at runtime to di...
Architectural Mismatch or Why it's hard to build systems out of existing parts
, 1995
"... Many would argue that future breakthroughs in software productivity will depend on our ability to combine existing pieces of software to produce new applications. An important step towards this goal is the development of new techniques to detect and cope with mismatches in the assembled parts. Some ..."
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Cited by 375 (11 self)
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Many would argue that future breakthroughs in software productivity will depend on our ability to combine existing pieces of software to produce new applications. An important step towards this goal is the development of new techniques to detect and cope with mismatches in the assembled parts. Some problems of composition are due to low-level issues of interoperability, such as mismatches in programming languages or database schemas. However, in this paper we highlight a different, and in manywaysmore pervasive, class of problem: architectural mismatch. Specifically, we use our experience in building a family of software design environments from existing parts to illustrate a variety of types of mismatch that center around the assumptions a reusable part makes about the structure of the application in which is to appear. Based on this experience we show how an architectural view of the mismatch problem exposes some fundamental, thorny problems for software composition and suggests poss...
A Formal Approach to Software Architecture
, 1997
"... As software systems become more complex, the overall system structure---or software architecture---becomes a central design problem. A system's architecture provides a model of the system that suppresses implementation detail, allowing the architect to concentrate on the analyses and decisions ..."
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Cited by 363 (19 self)
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As software systems become more complex, the overall system structure---or software architecture---becomes a central design problem. A system's architecture provides a model of the system that suppresses implementation detail, allowing the architect to concentrate on the analyses and decisions that are most crucial to structuring the system to satisfy its requirements. Unfortunately, current representations of software architecture are informal and ad hoc. While architectural concepts are often embodied in infrastructure to support specific architectural styles and in the initial conceptualization of a system configuration, the lack of an explicit, independently-characterized architecture or architectural style significantly limits the benefits of software architectural design in current practice. In this dissertation, I show that an Architecture Description Language based on a formal, abstract model of system behavior can provide a practical means of describing and analyzing softwar...
Abstractions for Software Architecture and Tools to Support Them
- IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
, 1995
"... 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 ..."
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Cited by 358 (5 self)
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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...
Acme: An Architecture Description Interchange Language
- in Proceedings of CASCON’97
, 1997
"... Numerous architectural description languages (ADLs) have been developed, each providing complementary capabilities for architectural development and analysis. Unfortunately, each ADL and supporting toolset operates in isolation, making it di cult to integrate those tools and share architectural desc ..."
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Cited by 347 (22 self)
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Numerous architectural description languages (ADLs) have been developed, each providing complementary capabilities for architectural development and analysis. Unfortunately, each ADL and supporting toolset operates in isolation, making it di cult to integrate those tools and share architectural descriptions. Acme is being developed as a joint e ort of the software architecture research community as a common interchange format for architecture design tools. Acme provides a structural framework for characterizing architectures, together with annotation facilities for additional ADLspeci c information. This scheme permits subsets of ADL tools to share architectural information that is jointly understood, while tolerating the presence of information that falls outside their common vocabulary. In this paper we describe Acme's key features, rationale, and technical innovations. 1
Dynamic structure in software architectures
- In Proceedings of the Fourth ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering
, 1996
"... Much of the recent work on Architecture Description Languages (ADL) has concentrated on specifying organisations of components and connectors which are static. When the ADL specification is used to drive system construction, then the structure of the resulting system in terms of its component instan ..."
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Cited by 253 (6 self)
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Much of the recent work on Architecture Description Languages (ADL) has concentrated on specifying organisations of components and connectors which are static. When the ADL specification is used to drive system construction, then the structure of the resulting system in terms of its component instances and their interconnection is fixed. This paper examines ADL features which permit the description of dynamic software architectures in which the organisation of components and connectors may change during system execution. The paper outlines examples of language features which support dynamic structure. These examples are taken from Darwin, a language used to describe distributed system structure. An operational semantics for these features is presented in the n-calculus, together with a discussion of their advantages and limitations. The paper discusses some general approaches to dynamic architecture description suggested by these examples. 1
ArchJava: Connecting Software Architecture to Implementation
, 2001
"... Software architecture describes the structure of a system, enabling more effective design, program understanding, and formal analysis. However, existing approaches decouple implementation code from architecture, allowing inconsistencies, causing confusion, violating architectural properties, and inh ..."
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Cited by 241 (29 self)
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Software architecture describes the structure of a system, enabling more effective design, program understanding, and formal analysis. However, existing approaches decouple implementation code from architecture, allowing inconsistencies, causing confusion, violating architectural properties, and inhibiting software evolution. ArchJava is an extension to Java that seamlessly unifies software architecture with implementation, ensuring that the implementation conforms to architectural constraints. A case study applying ArchJava to a circuit-design application suggests that ArchJava can express architectural structure effectively within an implementation, and that it can aid in program understanding and software evolution.
Alias Annotations for Program Understanding
- In Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA
, 2002
"... One of the primary challenges in building and evolving large object-oriented systems is dealing with aliasing between objects. Unexpected aliasing can lead to broken invariants, mistaken assumptions, security holes, and surprising side effects, all of which may lead to software defects and complicat ..."
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Cited by 207 (12 self)
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One of the primary challenges in building and evolving large object-oriented systems is dealing with aliasing between objects. Unexpected aliasing can lead to broken invariants, mistaken assumptions, security holes, and surprising side effects, all of which may lead to software defects and complicate software evolution.
