CW 502

Nelis Boucké, Danny Weyns and Tom Holvoet
View relations and composition, and tool support in xADL

Abstract

Experience with the design of industrial strength architectures revealed a lack of support for relating views in architectural descriptions (ADs). Leaving relations among views implicit leads to ambiguity and hampers changing the AD while keeping it consistent. We claim that relations and compositions between views should be first-class concepts of architectural descriptions languages. Recently, we introduced three concrete relations, i.e. refinement, mapping and unification. We illustrated the use of these relations in several examples using xADL. Besides improved clarity and consistency of ADs, relations between views enable (automatic) composition of views. A view composition explicitizes how two or more views and relations among these views are used for integration, resulting in an integrated view. In this paper, we provide an overview of relations and view composition. We show how we have developed support for automatic generation of integrated views in the Arch- Studio environment. We use a simplified video-on-demand system as an illustration.