Exploiting Style in Architectural Design Environments

Authors: David Garlan, Robert Allen, John Ockerbloom

Proceedings of SIGSOFT '94 Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, December 1994.

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Abstract

As the design of software architectures emerges as a discipline within software engineering, it will become increasingly important to support architectural description and analysis with tools and environments. In this paper we describe a system for developing architectural design environments that exploit architectural styles to guide software architects in producing specific systems. The primary contributions of this research are:

A generic object model for representing architectural designs;
The characterization of architectural styles as speculations of this object model;
A toolkit for creating an open architectural design environment from a description of a specific architectural style.

We use our experience in implementing these concepts to illustrate how style-oriened architectural design raises new challenges for software support environments.

Keywords: Software Architecture, architectual style, architectual description, architectual design, object model, design environment

For further information, please visit the home pages of the ABLE research project and Carnegie Mellon University's Composable Systems Group.

Last modified: 8/29/2006. For comments and problems, contact able-help@cs.cmu.edu.