Towards a Systematic Approach for Software Synthesis

Development of software-intensive systems nowadays rely extremely on middleware platforms as a major building block especially to handle the distribution issues. This dependency has become even more crucial in the distributed embedded systems environment. As such, the architectural choices of such systems are being driven by middleware platforms. However, diversity and high frequency of evolution in middleware platforms lead to architectural models becoming obsolete relatively rapidly, which is in distinct contrast to the resistance nature of software architecture to frequent change. We believe that the key to this is to abstract away from architectural platforms and their induced architectural styles to more abstract representation of applications. In recent work we have shown that architecture-independent application models, developed using modern model-based development (MBD) techniques, can be mapped to application architectures in a variety of architectural styles. Although the work provided an important proof of concept, the styles, or architectural spaces, to which application models were being mapped were simple, idealized styles. Di Nitto and Rosenblum recognized that middleware and similar platforms induce defacto architectural styles. In this paper, we discuss some of the related issues we are addressing in our research towards a systematic approach for software synthesis.