Session:Architecture Design II--Paper Preview

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A Model-Driven Approach to Extract Views from an Architecture Description Language

Cristóvão Oliveira, Michel Wermelinger

A common approach to defining architectural views is to have independent heterogeneous representations that are tailored to each view’s purpose, but this makes reconciling views into an overall architectural description harder. In this paper we put forward a complementary (not alternative) approach in which some views are derived from a given architecture description language (ADL) in a systematic way, by listing the design questions each view should answer. The approach is based on constructing the language’s metamodel and extending it with the entities and associations needed to capture and explicitly relate the required views.

Architecture Assessment Model for System Evolution

Sutirtha Bhattacharya, Dewayne Perry

Even though there has been some research on system evolution, there is no well defined vocabulary to indicate deviation of a system from desired goals. Further, there are no objective measures to indicate whether changes incorporated into a system as part of its evolution violates the integrity of the architectural design. Also, little research has been done to categorize the aspects of a software system that is subject to deviation as the system evolves. In this paper we develop a model for tracking software evolution and propose measures that will objectively indicate the extent of deviation or divergence in a software system. We also categorize the different aspects of software, changes to which can significantly impact usability as well as conceptual coherence.

An Architectural Style for Ajax

Ali Mesbah, Arie van Deursen

A new breed of web application, dubbed AJAX, is emerging in response to a limited degree of interactivity in large-grain stateless Web interactions. At the heart of this new approach lies a single page interaction model that facilitates rich interactivity. We have studied and experimented with several AJAX frameworks trying to understand their architectural properties. In this paper, we summarize three of these frameworks and examine their properties and introduce the SPIAR architectural style. We describe the guiding software engineering principles and the constraints chosen to induce the desired properties. The style emphasizes user interface component development, and intermediary delta-communication between client/server components, to improve user interactivity and ease of development. In addition, we use the concepts and principles to discuss various open issues in AJAX frameworks and application development.

See the preprint at arxiv for the paper.