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A formal basis for architectural connection
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Source ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM) archive
Volume 6 ,  Issue 3  (July 1997) table of contents
Pages: 213 - 249  
Year of Publication: 1997
ISSN:1049-331X
Authors
Robert Allen  Carnegie Mellon Univ., Pittsburgh, PA
David Garlan  Carnegie Mellon Univ., Pittsburgh, PA
Publisher
ACM  New York, NY, USA
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ABSTRACT

As software systems become more complex, the overall system structure—or software architecture—becomes a central design problem. An important step toward an engineering discipline of software is a formal basis for describing and analyzing these designs. In the article we present a formal approach to one aspect of architectural design: the interactions among components. The key idea is to define architectural connectors as explicit semantic entities. These are specified as a collection of protocols that characterize each of the participant roles in an interaction and how these roles interact. We illustrate how this scheme can be used to define a variety of common architectural connectors. We further provide a formal semantics and show how this leads to a system in which architectural compatibility can be checked in a way analogous to type-checking in programming languages.


REFERENCES

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CITED BY  184


REVIEW

"Markus Wolf : Reviewer"

Allen and Garlan present a formal approach to the description of the architectural design of interacting components of a software system. The intention of the approach is to extend traditional methods of formalizing architectural design (Inter  more...

Collaborative Colleagues:
Robert Allen: colleagues
David Garlan: colleagues