A reusable architecture for federated client/server systems

This paper describes research into the design of reusable and extensible software architectures for families of systems. The approach is illustrated by an example of a federation of client/server software systems. The architecture, which is specified in an Architecture Description Language, is organized at three levels of software reuse, application domain independent, domain specific, and application specific. The architecture is composed of reusable domain specific black box architecture patterns and extensible domain specific white box architecture patterns. The paper describes the different levels of reuse in the software architecture and how the architecture may be extended.