Materializing Architecture Recovered from Object-Oriented Source Code in Component-Based Languages

International audienceIn the literature of software engineering, many approaches have been proposed for the recovery of software architectures. These approaches propose to group classes into highly-cohesive and loosely-coupled clusters considered as architectural components. The recovered architecture plays mainly a documentation role, as high-level design views that enhance software understandability. In addition, architecture recovery can be considered as an intermediate step for migration to component-based platforms. This migration allows to fully benefit from all advantages brought by software component concept. For that, the recovered clusters should not be considered as simple packaging and deployment units. They should be treated as real components: true structural and behavior units that are instantiable from component descriptors and connected together to materialize the architecture of the software. In this paper, we propose an approach for revealing component descriptors, component instances and component-based architecture to materialize the recovered architecture of an object-oriented software in component-based languages. We applied our solution onto two well known component-based languages, OSGi and SOFA

Explicitly Integrated Architecture - An Approach for Integrating Software Architecture Model Information with Program Code

Software-Architekturspezifikationen und -Implementierungen sind zwei Sichtweisen auf Softwarearchitektur. Sie beschreiben gemeinsame Aspekte, wie z.B. die Existenz und Verbindung von Komponenten. Die Spezifikation fügt Informationen zum Design, zur Kommunikation und zur Analyse hinzu. Die Implementierung beschreibt stattdessen zusätzlich Details für ein ausführbares System. Die Konsistenz zwischen diesen Darstellungen manuell zu verwalten, ist schwierig und fehleranfällig. Diese Arbeit stellt einen Ansatz vor, der Informationen der Architekturspezifikation vollständig in die Implementierung integriert, sodass die Spezifikation als eigenständiges Artefakt nicht mehr notwendig ist. Das Tool Codeling extrahiert die integrierte Architekturspezifikation in unterschiedlichen Sprachen aus dem Code und propagiert Änderungen in dieser Spezifikation automatisch an den Code zurück.Specifications and implementations are both viewpoints upon software architecture. Besides common aspects, the specification adds information for design, communication, or analysis, while the implementation adds details for an executable system instead. Managing the consistency between these representations manually is difficult and error-prone. This thesis presents an approach, that completely integrates architecture specifications with the implementation, so that separate specification artifacts are not necessary anymore. The tool Codeling extracts integrated architecture specifications in multiple languages from code, and automatically propagates changes in these specifications back to the code