Page 56 - DCAP507_SYSTEM_SOFTWARE
P. 56
System Software
Notes 3.1.1 Software Architecture
Architecture Description Languages
Architecture Description Languages (ADLs) are employed to explain a Software Architecture.
Several different ADLs have been developed by dissimilar organizations, including AADL (SAE
standard), Wright (developed by Carnegie Mellon), Acme (developed by Carnegie Mellon),
xADL (developed by UCI), Darwin (developed by Imperial College London), DAOP-ADL
(developed by University of Málaga), and ByADL (University of L'Aquila, Italy). Common
elements of an ADL are component, connector and configuration.
Views
Software architecture is usually organized in views, which are analogous to the different types
of blueprints made in building architecture. A view is a representation of a set of system
components and relationships among them. Within the ontology established by ANSI/IEEE
1471-2000, views are responses to viewpoints, where a viewpoint is a specification that describes
the architecture in question from the perspective of a given set of stakeholders and their concerns.
Task The viewpoint specifies not only the concerns addressed but the presentation,
model kinds used, conventions used and any consistency (correspondence) rules to keep a
view consistent with other views. Analyze
Some possible views (actually, viewpoints in the 1471 ontology) are:
Functional/logic view
Code/module view
Development/structural view
Concurrency/process/runtime/thread view
Physical/deployment/install view
User action/feedback view
Data view/data model.
More than a few languages for describing software architectures ('architecture description
language' in ISO/IEC 42010/IEEE-1471 terminology) have been devised, but no agreement
exists on which symbol-set or language should be used to describe each architecture view. The
UML is a standard that can be used "for analysis, design, and implementation of software-based
systems as well as for modeling business and similar processes." Thus, the UML is a visual
language that can be used to create software architecture.
Architecture Frameworks
Frameworks related to the domain of software architecture are:
4+1
RM-ODP (Reference Model of Open Distributed Processing)
Service-Oriented Modeling Framework (SOMF)
50 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY