Research On Visual Modeling And Refinement Into Design Of Distributed Software Architecture

The component-based software reuse and development (CBSD) is considered as an effective and efficient approach to improve the productivity and quality of software development, and is applied widely in building distributed systems. But, current research on software component technologies is mostly concentrating on binary component and component implementation models such as EJB, COM+ and CORBA, which is short of a systematic approach to guide the whole development process. Recently, the research on Software Architecture (SA) has made significant progress, which has thus far mainly addressed formal specification and analysis of coarse-grained software models. In CBSD, SA plays a role of blueprint to guide the system composition and integration with components. SA's validity and availability not only affect the system development efficiency, but also determine the system's maintenance and evolution costs. Architecture Description Languages (ADLs) are highly specialized in modeling high-level functional and non-functional aspects of software system and tend to rely on abstract notions such as Component, Connector and Interface.ADLs comprise a sizeable set of modeling techniques that are aimed at bridging the gap between requirements and low-level design and code. This creates problems when it conies to refining ADL into platform-specific programming constructs. The formality of architectural descriptions lacks of support for downstream development activities, and their poor integration with mainstream approaches have made them unattractive to a large segment of the development community. This paper demonstrates how a mainstream design notation, The Unified Modeling Language (UML), can help address these concerns. We have devised mechanisms for transforming architectural models into implementation code by leveraging the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and defined a set of rules to transform ADL into an initial UML model that can then be further refined.In this paper, an CAOSC (Component-based Architecture-Oriented distributed Software Composition) development approach is proposed, aiming at offering aneffective systematic solution for component-based reuse. Firstly, We design a distributed software architecture description language ADEAG and implement its compiler with JavaCC; Secondly, Design and implement a Component based Distributed software design Toolkit-- CDisTool. With CDisTool, system designer can describe the system architecture in a visualized way with the GUI and the graphical description can be translated into ADEAG text context; Thirdly, We introduce a component interaction model which is implementation independent and supports component interaction specification, analysis, and run-time verification, and a language, Dicide, is presented, to specify component interactions based on the model. Finally, We describe an automated approach to help refine a high-level architecture into a design description in UML.