Abstract:

Abstract:As an important means to control the complexity of software systems, to improve software quality and to support software development and software reuse, software architecture has become a mainstream research field in the software engineering community. Now, software architecture research not only focuses on the design phase, but also covers every phase of software lifecycle. This paper surveys the update-to-date research and practice of software architecture from a software lifecycle’s perspective, and discusses the potential research directions of software architecture.

Abstract:Software architecture (SA) provides a high-level abstraction for component-based software development. It’s important to specify the interaction behavior of the components, verify the compatibility among the components, and ensure the deadlock-freedom of the composition configuration at the architectural level. Many component-based software architectures are using object-oriented paradigm, in which component composition is implemented by method invocations over component interfaces. Concentrating on the component composition in this kind of SA, this paper formally specifies the components and their interaction behaviors, distinguishes the caller’s behavior from the callee’s in interaction, and then presents a set of rules to verify the behavioral compatibility on the interfaces between the components composed together. Finally, an example of e-commerce application is presented to illustrate the feasibility and pertinence of the approach.

Abstract:Existing software development approaches construct component model in an unstructured and informal way, and the dependencies among components are implicit and lack rigorous semantic. They don’t support top-down component reuse effectively. This paper tries to address these problems by using category theory to define the links between components, so that the links between components and the link compositions have rigorous meaning. The morphism composition is used to trace the relationships between components at different abstraction levels, and the architecture design pattern is used to define component composition and constrains precisely. Category theory supports the diagrammatic representation of component model that visualizes the relationships between components and the structural feature. The constructed component model is understandable, traceable, and hence reusable. Formal component modeling approach is suitable to the software development for reuse.

Abstract:A critical issue for complex software architecture design is the modeling and analysis of connectors. This paper argues for an approach to composite reuse of connectors based on reflection. To support this notion a set of mata-operations of connectors composition steming from the operations between processes in CSP have been identified, and the CSP semantics of composite connector are also provided. As it will be shown that it provides mechanisms for designing connectors in an incremental way, and can be analysed and checked automatically owing to the formal basis.

Abstract:DSSA (domain-specific software architecture) is essential for the development of applications in the same domain. Feature-based domain model makes the mapping from domain requirements to DSSA possible. In this paper, ontology is introduced as the representation basis for feature models, and feature ontology of a domain is also taken as the semantic description basis for business components in the domain. Then a feature model and component semantics based method for conceptual architecture design are proposed. Commonality, variability, binding time, structural relations, and dependencies are taken into account in the method. The component semantics act as the transition from feature to conceptual component design. The methods have been implemented in the ontology-based feature modeling tool and feature-based architecture development tool, and exhibit effective supports for domain development.

Abstract:The design of software architecture plays an important role in a software process. In the design phase, the non-functional feature evaluation of software architecture would contribute a lot in providing high quality software products. Modeling patterns, which is an extension of UML (unified modeling language), are brought forward for software non-functional feature evaluation in this paper. Furthermore, an example, in which modeling pattern “AvailabilityChain” is used to evaluate the availability of software architecture “1 Message Distributor—n Message Processors”, is given to illustrate the application of modeling patterns. Moreover, to support the application of modeling patterns, “Modeling Pattern Knowledge-Base”, in which modeling patterns and reference values of tags used by each modeling pattern are managed, is involved. UML-based Patterns and Modeling Pattern Knowledge base will simplify the evaluation of software architecture in the software process and contribute a lot in providing high quality software products.

Abstract:This paper analyzes the effect of Container style middleware on the structure and performance of Component-based system based on architectural patterns, and proposes an approach integrating Container style middleware components and their interaction relation into the application UML (unified modeling language) models. The performance model derived from the integrated UML models can reflect the impact of middleware. So, analysts do not have to know the internal details of middleware at performance modeling. The architectural pattern-based method can be extended to deal with various style middlewares. In the paper, the proposed approach is illustrated by a case study.

Abstract:The generic adaptive software architecture style is studied. Through the analysis of the basic characteristics of adaptive software architecture, the generic framework for adaptive software architecture is extracted. The integrated reference model of adaptive software architecture (ASA-IRM) is proposed based on multiview modelling theory. The rules of model mapping and evolution in ASA-IRM are discussed. The algorithm of model mapping consistency is proposed based on metamodelling and graph transformation theories. Finally, an integrated support environment for ASA-IRM is developed. The adaptive software architecture can be used in the development of complex software system, especially in open