Architectural Reasoning in ArchJava

{jonal, chambers}@cs.washington.edu Abstract Software architecture is a crucial part of the specification of component-based systems. Reasoning about software architecture can aid design, program understanding, and formal analysis. However, existing approaches decouple implementation code from architecture, allowing inconsistencies, causing confusion, violating architectural properties, and inhibiting software evolution. ArchJava is an extension to Java that seamlessly unifies a software architecture with its implementation. ArchJava’s type system ensures that the implementation conforms to the architectural constraints. Therefore, programmers can visualize, analyze, reason about, and evolve architectures with confidence that architectural properties are preserved by the implementation.