A Meta-architecture for Service-oriented Systems and Applications

Abstract

The paper proposes a new meta-architecture as a reference model for developing service-oriented systems and applications. The seven-layer meta-architecture is called STCBMER (Smart Client-Template-Bean-Controller-Mediator-Entity-Resource). The purpose of it is to reduce software complexity and ensure the quality of adaptability defined as the degree to which an information system or application is difficult to understand, maintain and evolve. The main difficulty stems from complex interactions (dependencies) between system elements. The dependencies can be minimized if the system under development adheres to the architectural design and can be verified by analysing the implementation code. The paper reinforces the proposition that an architectural intent for adaptive complex systems requires some sort of hierarchical layered structure (according to the holon abstraction as an approach to restraining software complexity).

Towards an Architecture of Electronic Service Market System - requirements analysis and evaluation

“…The research was started few years ago, and the partial results were tested in different contexts and projects in the last 10 years. The developed artefacts, including the discovered appointment coordination (AC) processes, ESM SA, software delivery concepts, social impact of ESM and related-platforms, UI-specific issues related with cross-platform applications, and other topics, were researched thanks to the long and deep engagement of different researchers and practitioners [12], [13], [14], [15], [1], [16], [17], [18], [19]. Right now, for more than 2 years, the team includes 3 universities from 3 different countries (Switzerland, Germany and Poland), 2 different companies (Switzerland), 3 social organisations (one from Switzerland and two from Germany) and more than 20 researchers and practitioners engaged.…”

“…STCBMER (Smart Client-Template-Controller-BeanMediator-Entity-Resource) is such a component-based [25], [11] meta-architecture [14] designed to support building modern, layered enterprise software systems. STCBMER was comparatively evaluated with other component-based, layered meta-architectures in previous works of the authors [12], [13]. STCBMER is following various architectural principles [13] which are simple pieces of practical architectural knowledge [4], captured by SA researchers and practitioners, and used to build different kinds of software models.…”