Graphical support for configuration programming

Kramer, Jeff; Magee, Jeff; Ng, K.

doi:10.1109/hicss.1989.48096

Cited by 6 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…Firstly, the use of a declarative explicit architecture characterises our work on configuration programming. The prototype distributed system Conic [2,3] included the ability to specify, construct and dynamically evolve a distributed software system [2,4] , using a configuration language to explicitly compose software components [5,6] . Work on the general purpose ADL, Darwin [7−9] , and its industrial instantiation, Koala [10] , followed, providing a sound structural language and facilities for variations respectively.…”

Section: Rigorous Architectural Approach: a Brief Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

A Rigorous Architectural Approach to Adaptive Software Engineering

Kramer

Magee

2009

J. Comput. Sci. Technol.

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The engineering of distributed adaptive software is a complex task which requires a rigorous approach. Software architectural (structural) concepts and principles are highly beneficial in specifying, designing, analysing, constructing and evolving distributed software. A rigorous architectural approach dictates formalisms and techniques that are compositional, components that are context independent and systems that can be constructed and evolved incrementally. This paper overviews some of the underlying reasons for adopting an architectural approach, including a brief "rational history" of our research work, and indicates how an architectural model can potentially facilitate the provision of self-managed adaptive software system. Software Architecture ApproachesDistributed processing offers the most general, flexible and promising approach for the provision of computing services. It offers advantages in its potential for improving availability and reliability through replication; performance through parallelism; and sharing and interoperability through interconnection.Studies in software maintenance for distributed systems have indicated that the general move to distribution contributed to the simplification of the primitive software components used in distributed systems. However, this benefit is often overwhelmed by the increased complexity of the overall system. There is therefore a need to deal with issues such as component interaction and composition, design complexity, system organisation and reasoning. Rigorous use of a software architecture offers much potential benefit in providing a framework or skeleton with which to deal with these issues.Software architecture descriptions aim to specify system structure at a sufficiently abstract level to deal with large and complex systems yet be sufficiently detailed to support reasoning about various aspects and properties. Architectures are generally defined hierarchically, as compositions of interconnected components. A component type is defined in a context-independent manner in terms of its communication interface: the services it provides to other components and the services it requires in order to perform its functionality.Composite components are defined in terms of their constituent components (other primitive or composite components) and the bindings between these. Services provided internally are bound to an interface service provision so as to be available externally. Service requirements which cannot be satisfied internal to the composite component are made visible at its interface. Thus architectural descriptions support abstraction by hierarchical decomposition and encapsulation. The purpose of an Architectural Description Language (ADL) is to facilitate provision of precise software architecture descriptions, and to provide associated reasoning and/or software construction support.A software architecture can be used as a model in much the same way as other engineers build models to check particular aspects of a system design. We believe that an ADL...

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Section: Rigorous Architectural Approach: a Brief Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

A Rigorous Architectural Approach to Adaptive Software Engineering

Kramer

Magee

2009

J. Comput. Sci. Technol.

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“…The configuration management tool and its supporting environment is described in [ 121. The configuration description may be submitted directly as text to the configuration management tool or indirectly using a graphical editor described in more detail in [15]. Note that, in addition to instance creation and linking (interconnection), the configuration description includes module location (the at clause) and module parameters.…”

Section: Figure 6 -Initial Patient Monitoring Systemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Configuration support for system description, construction and evolution

KramerJ.

MageeJ.

SlomanM.

1989

SIGSOFT Softw. Eng. Notes

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Software systems can be conveniently described, constructed and managed in terms of their configuration, where configuration is the system structure defined as the set of constituent software components together with their interconnections. A specification of the system confiig;uration can be used both to describe the required system structure and to generate the actual system itself. Evolution of the system is achieved by monitoring the status of the components and making extensions or changes to the system configuration by the addition of software components or the replacement of existing ones. The performance of these tasks at the configuration level is termed configuration programming, and is best supported by the use of a declarative configuration language and associated support tools. This paper discusses the main princilples of this approach and illustrates its practice by describing the support which has been provided in the Conic environment for distributed systems.

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