Architecture support for global business objects

Abstract

The development of world-wide distributed object-oriented systems poses a c onsiderable number of hard questions. In this paper, we summarize these questions as a set of requirements which we consider to be important for a software architecture t o be successful, and we present our solution for such a software architecture. Our main conclusion is that such a software architecture must be reflective in all its key abstractions in order t o allow analyzing and operationalizing its properties. A mainstream banking project is on its way which conforms to this architecture. At Ubilab, we are focusing on the research aspects of the project like enabling smooth evolution and explicitly modeling and operationalizing the software architecture at runtime. 1 Introduction and Motivation The Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) is a large globally operating bank the operations of which require more and more world-wide distributed applications. New applications must integrate with old applications and must be prevented from turning into legacy applications themselves. To address these problems, UBS is developing a homogenous object-oriented software architecture for both wrapping and integrating legacy systems and providing a common base for new applications. In this paper, we present the main requirements for such an architecture as well as our solutions. Key requirements for this architecture are that it must explicitly support evolution from the very first day, must flexibly utilize and integrate existing and new middleware, and must provide information to analyze the architecture and to operationalize it, for example to guarantee pre-specified runtime behavior. We approach this goal with a distributed object-oriented virtual machine based on a small number of reflective key abstractions. We use this virtual machine to provide flexible evolution support and an operationalized software architecture model that lets components analyze and control the system. UBS is undertaking this effort in form of a regular banking project, for which Genesis Development Corporation is consulting. The authors of this paper are three of the four authors of the key software architecture specification document [1]. Earlier this year, a first prototype has shown the feasibility of