A Family of Software Architecture Implementation Frameworks

Software architectures provide high-level abstractions for representing the structure, behavior, and key properties of software systems. Various architecture description languages, styles, tools, and technologies have emerged over the past decade. At the same time, there has been comparatively little focus on techniques and technologies for transforming architectural models into running systems. This often results in significant differences between conceptual and concrete architectures, rendering system evolution and maintenance difficult. Furthermore, it calls into question the ability of developers to consistently transfer the key architectural properties into system implementations. One solution to this problem is to employ architectural frameworks. Architectural frameworks provide support for implementing, deploying, executing, and evolving software architectures. This paper describes the design of and our experience with a family of architectural frameworks that support implementation of systems in a specific architectural style–C2. These frameworks have been implemented in different programming languages and used on different hardware platforms, including resource constrained (e.g., hand held) devices. The frameworks are lightweight and extensible, and allow application monitoring and analysis at run time. To date, the C2 frameworks have been used in the development of over 100 applications by several academic and industrial organizations. The paper discusses the issues we have encountered in implementing and using the frameworks, as well as the approaches adopted to resolve these issues.