A basic model for components implementation of software architecture

Abstract

Components defined in software architecture have two features: as basic elements of the architecture, they must conform to the architectural constraints and in the meantime, similar to the common components, they should be designed flexibly enough to be able to be developed independently for the late third party integration. However, these two important issues have always been handled separately from different point of views, which leads to the extra work, confusions in the program structures as well as the difficulty in maintenance. This paper presents a basic model of the architecture-based components implementation to band these two issues together. It firstly describes a novel design pattern, triple-C pattern which stands for <u>C</u>omponents-<u>C</u>ommunicate-through-<u>C</u>onnector. This pattern not only emphasizes that implementation must completely conform to the architectural definition, but also attempts to change the fundamental way of components communication with suggesting provided service should be transferred through the connector instead of directly between the client and server components. Second, it describes a novel ADL JCMPL, toolset JCMP and techniques to keep architectural conformance in the implementation as well as support the architectural integration from separate components. Finally, this model is evaluated in a case study.