Application of Architecture Implementation Patterns by Incremental Code Generation

Abstract

Reference architectures have been established in many domains of software engineering enabling reuse of expert knowledge of design, guidelines and much more. Nevertheless, reference architectures might also lead to boilerplate code and implementation overhead. This work addresses this drawback by introducing architecture implementation patterns (AIM Patterns), which are automatically applicable to the application code by an incremental generation approach. AIM Patterns are restricted to and developed for a specific reference architecture as the solution part of an AIM Pattern will be enriched by architecture prescribed implementation details to enable code generation at all. Thus, we gain from the modularized structure of patterns already occurring in pattern-based reference architectures used in industries. By the use of an incremental code generation approach we establish seamless integration of architectural-driven code generation into the developers individual development process on the basis of strict code conventions. The incremental code generation approach has already been successfully used in practice giving a first impression of how the approach can be successfully applied in today's software development. In contrast to that, the specification of the AIM Patterns describes a new extension to incremental code generation establishing a more structured way of reusing architectural knowledge also on code level.