The Study Of A Message-Based Framework And Its Application

Software architecture has been a focal point for software engineering research. The research is directed at reducing costs of developing applications and increasing the potential for commonality between different members of a closely related product family. Software development based on common architectural idioms has its focus shifted from lines-of-code to coarser-grained architectural elements (software components and connectors) and their overall interconnection structure. The explicit treatment of software connectors separates communication issues from computation in a system.This paper presents a message-based framework which supports the coordinated work of distributed components with the help of connectors. We design the framework initially with the paradigm that the flexibility of the connections between the components (using connectors) could be maximized with which the goal of commonality is achieved. Then we extended the framework to express more semantics such as that used in Petri Net.To examine the capability of the framework, we have applied it in the kernel of a workflow engine prototype and have proved that its flexibility has the capability to support such applications.