6 - Typical Architectural Styles

Abstract

This chapter analyzes a number of software architectural styles. Data flow is a software architectural style that is widely used in various application domains where data processing plays a significant role. The pipe-and-filter architectural style is a special case of data flow style. In the data flow, architecture components are highly independent. There is no global control of the components' behavior. The architectural style of independent components has attracted increasing interest recently for its strong support to software reuse and evolution due to its ease of integration of components into a system. It has a number of sub-types of style including communicating processes, event-based implicit invocation, and multi-agent systems. Call-and-return architecture is the dominant architectural style in large systems. This is directly supported by the classical and current programming paradigms. A number of subtypes of the style have emerged including main-program-and-subroutine with shared data, layered systems, abstract data types, and object–oriented systems. The data-centered architecture refers to systems in which the access and update of a widely accessed data-store is an apt description.