Abstract

Architectural styles are named collections of constraints on configurations of architectural elements, and are believed to bring economies of scale in applying software architecture techniques to software development. Most research on architectural styles focuses on analyzing and observing the properties of such styles from their descriptions. However, comparatively little is known about the systematic design and construction of software architectures using architectural styles. Existing classifications bring out differences between architectural styles, but none provides a clear understanding of the similarities among a large number of styles. The basis of our research is the observation that architectural styles share many underlying concepts. These shared concepts lead to “architectural primitives ” that can be systematically and constructively composed to obtain elements of architectural styles. We have identified eight forms and nine functions as architectural primitives that, in our understanding, reflect the syntactic and semantic characteristics of a large number of styles. While proving such a hypothesis is difficult in the general case, we demonstrate it within the domain of network-based styles. Partial formal models of style elements composed from these architectural primitives are also constructed and shown to be analyzable.

Citations