An Approach for Mapping Domain-Specific AOM Applications to a General Model

An Adaptive Object Model (AOM) is a common architectural style for systems in which classes, attributes, relationships and behaviors of applications are represented as metadata consumed at runtime. This allows them to be very flexible and changeable at runtime, enabling their modification by end users without source code modification. Nevertheless, this flexibility comes with a cost of a greater complexity when developing the system, and therefore one usually uses a bottom-up approach, adding flexibility only when it is needed. As a consequence, many AOM components are tied to the specific domain of a single application and this fact makes it difficult to develop and use generic and reusable AOM frameworks that properly handle specific requirements of the AOM architecture. This work presents an architectural model that aims to adapt domain-specific AOM core structures to a common core structure by identifying AOM roles played by each element through custom metadata configuration. By doing this, this model allows the integration of domain-specific AOM applications and AOM frameworks, making it feasible to develop reusable components for the AOM architecture. This model is evaluated by creating an AOM framework and a case study based on it, in which is performed a modularity and a performance analysis.