Description and Implementation of Dynamic Software Architectures:A Reflective Approach

The architecture of a software system is a high_level specification produced at the early stage of system development,and serves as an important guide for the following development.However,existing description languages of software architecture and their supporting systems have their weakness in terms of traceability and dynamism.In this paper a new approach for architecture description and implementation is proposed based on the principle and technology of reflective computation.With this approach the architecture of a software system is reified as an explicit and tangible object,based on which the system is constructed.This object provides a unified model for both the abstract description and the concrete implementation of the system architecture,which ensures architectural traceability.It also provides an explicit locus for the implementation and the control of dynamic architecture behaviors.Following this approach,a graph_oriented framework for the description and implementation of software architectures is presented,as well as one of its possible formal models based on edNCE graph grammars.We have also built a prototype supporting system in the World Wide Web environment.