On the role of middleware in architecture-based software development

  • Authors:

  • Nenad Medvidovic

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA

  • Venue:
  • SEKE '02 Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Software engineering and knowledge engineering
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

Software architectures promote development focused on modular functional building blocks (components), their interconnections (configurations), and their interactions (connectors). Since architecture-level components often contain complex functionality, it is reasonable to expect that their interactions will be complex as well. Middleware technologies such as CORBA, COM, and RMI, provide a set of predefined services for enabling component composition and interaction. However, the potential role of such services in the implementations of software architectures is not well understood. Furthermore, components adhering to one middleware standard cannot readily interact with those adhering to another. In order to understand the role and tradeoffs among middleware technologies in implementing architectures and enable component interoperability across middleware platforms, we have investigated a set of techniques and conducted preliminary case studies involving a particular architectural style, C2, and its implementation infrastructure. In particular, by encapsulating middleware functionality within C2's explicit software connectors, we have been able to couple C2's existing benefits such as component interchangeability, substrate independence, and structural guidance with new capabilities of multi-lingual, multi-process, and distributed application development in a manner that is transparent to architects. Furthermore, we have demonstrated the utility of our connector-based approach in enabling components implemented on top of different middleware platforms to interoperate. Though several details of our approach derive from the characteristics of the C2 style, we believe that a number of lessons learned are more generally applicable. We argue that these lessons can help form a broader research agenda for coupling the modeling power of software architectures with the implementation support provided by middleware.