AN APPLICATION FRAMEWORK FOR DYNAMIC DISTRIBUTED SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURES

摘要

It is now widely recognised that as software systems become more complex there is need to consider not only the data structures and algorithms but also the general structure (or architecture) of the system. Researchers developing distributed systems have for some time used module interconnection languages to describe the architectural elements of a distributed system. The architecture is usually described in terms of (computational) components, their interfaces (ports) and their relationships (connections). These languages are, however, too limited, particularly in terms of describing reusable and extensible distributed software architectures. In this paper, we present an object-oriented application framework for developing dynamic (reconfigurable) software architectures for distributed systems. Reconfig-urable software architectures differ from traditional software architectures because of their requirement for changes to take place during the system execution without having to shut down the system.