Authors:
Fabian Gilson
and
Vincent Englebert
Affiliation:
University of Namur, Belgium
Keyword(s):
Software Architecture, Component Composition, Communication Abstraction, User-defined Properties.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
General-Purpose Modeling Languages and Standards
;
Languages, Tools and Architectures
;
Model-Driven Software Development
;
Software Engineering
Abstract:
Software architectures are often abstracted as a combination of reusable components connected to each other by various means. Specifications of components' semantics have been widely studied and many modeling languages have been proposed from coarse-grained loosely-defined elements to operational objects with behavioral semantics that may be generated and executed in a dedicated framework. All these modeling facilities have proven their advantages in many domains through either case studies or real-world applications. However, most of those approaches either consider a subset of composition facilities, \textit{i.e.} the available types of bindings between components, or do not even consider communication properties at all, staying at behavioral-related compatibility between components. Verifications of communication-related properties are then postponed to the hand of software developers and finally considered at deployment-time only. Part of a general architecture framework, we prop
ose an abstraction formalism to specify communication paths between components. This modeling facility relies on a taxonomy of types of links and the specifications of communication protocols. This protocol serves as a \textit{reification} element between abstract component compositions, architecture instances and deployment infrastructure, making explicit communication-related constraints and properties.
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