Enforcing architecture and deployment constraints of distributed component-based software

Abstract

In the component-based software development process, the formalisation of architectural choices makes possible to explicit quality attributes. When dealing with the deployment of such component-based software in dynamic networks, in which disconnections or machine failures can occur, preserving architectural choices becomes difficult to ensure, as current architecture-centric languages and their support mainly focus on steps prior to the deployment one. We present in this paper a family of languages that formalise not only architectural choices but deployment aspects as well, both as constraints. Then, we show how all of these constraints are reified in order to manage the deployment of a component-based software in this context of a dynamic hosting platform. The proposed solution defines an automatic deployment that ensures permanently, at run time, the preservation of architecture and deployment choices, and thus their corresponding quality attributes. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.