An object-oriented bridge among architectural styles, aspects and frameworks

Abstract

Summary form only given. Proposes an architecture-driven design approach based on the concept of proto-frameworks, aiming to provide an intermediate stage in the transition from architectural models to object-oriented frameworks or applications. The approach relies on an object-oriented materialization of domain-specific architectures derived from domain models, i.e. the production of concrete computational representations of abstract architectural descriptions using object-oriented terminology. A proto-framework materializes, in object-oriented terms, the infrastructure required for cooperation and communication of each architectural component type. The framework gives abstract hooks to map specific domain components into a class hierarchy in a white-box fashion. This mapping can produce a specific application, but it can also produce new domain-specific frameworks that adopt the underlying architectural model. In the proposed approach, we can basically identify two stages. First, developers should figure out the problem architecture; aspects are initially mapped to architectural constructs, instead of being coded using framework language constructs. Second, the approach enables a materialization into a proto-framework, and then several kinds of frameworks implementations. These frameworks retain the properties inherited from the original architecture.