Software Architecture for Shared Information Systems

摘要

Software system design takes place at many levels. Different kinds of designelements, notations, and analyses distinguish these levels. At the software architecture level, designers combine subsystems into complete systems. This paper studies some of the common patterns of idioms, that guide these configurations. Results from software architecture offer some insight into the problems of systems integration-the task of connecting individual, isolated, pre-existing software systems to provide coherent, distributed solutions to large problems. As computing has become more sophisticated, so too have the software structures used in the integration task. This paper reviews historical examples of shared information systems in three different applications whose requirements share some common features about collecting, manipulating, and preserving large bodies of complex information. These applications have similar architectural histories in which a succession of designs responds to new technologies and new requirements for flexible, highly dynamic responses.... Allen Newell, Software architectures, Info. systems.