Concise Composit ion of Architectural Styles From Architectural Primit ives

Architectural styles represent composition patterns and constraints at the software architectural level and are targeted at families of systems with shared characteristics. They enable architectural reuse and hence can bring economy to the design of software architecture. Existing approaches support systematic description of style-based software architectures. Our approach, Alfa, focuses on the construction, instead of description, of style-based software architectures using architectural primitives. This is based on our observation that architectural styles and, indeed, software architectures share many underlying concepts that lead to architectural primitives. Previously, Alfa’s primitives were shown to be sufficient for modeling architectural styles. In this paper, we present the composition of a diverse set of styles for network-based systems using xAlfa, a systematic notation for composing styles from Alfa’s primitives. We then show that two reuse mechanisms in xAlfa, inheritance and composition, enable concise style compositions and unambiguously bring out similarities among architectural styles.