Ambient-PRISMA: Ambients in mobile aspect-oriented software architecture

Abstract

This work presents an approach called Ambient-PRISMA for modelling and developing distributed and mobile applications. Ambient-PRISMA enriches an aspect-oriented software architectural approach called PRISMA with the ambient concept from Ambient Calculus. Ambients are introduced in PRISMA as specialized kinds of connectors that offer mobility services to architectural elements (components and connectors) and are able to coordinate a boundary, which models the notion of location. Mobility of architectural elements is supported by reconfiguring the software architecture. This paper presents a metamodel that introduces ambients to design aspect-oriented software architectural models for mobile systems. The design of models is performed using an Aspect-Oriented Architecture Description Language. A middleware called Ambient-PRISMANET which maps the metamodel to .NET technology and supports the distributed runtime environment needed for executing mobile applications is also presented. In addition, a CASE Tool which allows users to specify the aspect-oriented architectural models in a graphical way and generate .NET code is provided. In this way, we explain how Ambient-PRISMA follows Model Driven Engineering. An example of an auction system is used throughout the article to illustrate the work.