Domain realisation

Abstract

Domain realisation deals with the design and implementation of reusable components and interfaces. In particular, the design of interfaces is crucial, since they are the basis for architectural variability based upon configuration variants. As different components provide or require a single interface, there may be many stakeholders in the component design, having their own interest in moving the level of abstraction. Reusable components should only use functionality that is presented by their required interfaces and they should provide exactly what is declared by their provided interfaces. The component developer has different mechanisms available to implement the variability of components. The choice is guided by the architectural texture, thus allowing a high degree of uniformity to be achieved in the implementation. The variability has to be presented to the application developer in order to enable the selection of the proper variants. For instance, this can be done by relating component parameters to the variability model. The components and interfaces have to be designed for robustness and configuration independence to be reusable. Interface adaptations have to be reduced to a minimum. Each such adaptation results in many component adaptations. Components do not always have to be designed from scratch. Often a component that was originally designed for a single application is promoted to a domain component. This involves redesign to remove the dependency of the component configuration in the specific application. In addition, variability has to be added in order to get the application-specific components as variants. © 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.