Data processing: software development – installation – and managem – Software program development tool – Translation of code
Reexamination Certificate
1997-10-28
2002-04-09
Chaki, Kakali (Department: 2122)
Data processing: software development, installation, and managem
Software program development tool
Translation of code
Reexamination Certificate
active
06370681
ABSTRACT:
FIELD OF THE INVENTION
The present invention is related to computer systems and computer implemented processes which allow a user to define representations of software systems. The present invention is also related to computer systems for storing multiple alternate implementations of computer programs. The present invention is also related to computer systems and computer implemented processes for generating computer program code from a high level description of a software system.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
The design and specification of software systems has been studied from many perspectives. Research in software architectures has lead to several languages for architectural description of software systems, including representing architectural taxonomies and specific software architectures.
Software development research has provided a variety of approaches to building software systems, including module interconnection languages, open software architectures such as software bus architectures, object oriented programming, coordination languages and application frameworks. An application framework includes an application programming interface and a set of protocols that guide the way calls to the application programming interface should be used inside components. Research in software reuse has also resulted in the development of software schemas such as the Programmer's Apprentice, and program transformation systems which translate programs between computer programming languages.
Other areas of research in software development include operating systems and concurrent and distributed systems. Additionally, numerous computer related software engineering tools, i.e., automated tools that support various phases of software design and development, also have been developed.
The present invention applies coordination theory to the representation of software systems. Coordination theory focuses on the interdisciplinary study of the process of managing dependencies among activities, in particular, business processes, operation research, organization theory, economics, linguistics, psychology and computer science. Coordination theory has been used as the basis for a representation and design of business processes in a process handbook, as described in PCT publication WO94/19742, published Sep. 1, 1994, also incorporated by reference. This reference does not discuss entities such as ports and resources as described below and how to generate executable code or system configurations from process representations.
Current programming languages and computer system design tools fail to recognize component interaction as a separate design problem, orthogonal to the specification and implementation of the core function of a component. That is, many software components have the built in assumptions about coordination, interoperability and architectural characteristics. Given a set of software components, designers typically either have to modify the code of existing components or have to write additional coordination software that bridges mismatches among components. Such mismatches include low level interoperability mismatches, such as differences in expected and provided procedure names, parameter orderings, data types, calling conventions and other interface mismatches. Another kind of mismatch is an architectural mismatch, such as different assumptions about the architecture of the application in which the components appear. Such mismatches include differences in expected and provided communications protocols, different assumptions about resource ownership and sharing, different assumptions about the presence or absence of particular operating system and hardware capabilities, etc. As design moves closer to implementation, current programming tools increasingly focus on representing components. At the implementation level, software systems are sets of source and executable modules in one or more programming languages. Although modules come under a variety of names and flavors, e.g., procedures, packages, objects and clusters, etc., they are all essentially abstractions for components.
By failing to provide separate abstractions for specifying and implementing interconnection protocols among software components, current programming languages force programmers to distribute such protocols among the interdependent components. As a consequence, code-level components encode, apart from their ostensible function, fragments of interconnection protocols from their original development environments. These fragments translate into a set of undocumented assumptions about their dependencies with the rest of the components in a system. When attempting to reuse components in new applications, such assumptions have to be identified manually and modified, in order to match the new interdependency patterns at the target environment. This often requires extensive modifications of existing code, or the development of additional coordination software.
To this date, there has been no uniform framework for describing the various kinds of component mismatches, or systematic set of rules for dealing with them. Designers generally rely on their own intuition and experience and the problem of component composition is still being confronted in a largely ad-hoc fashion.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
The present invention provides a mechanism for easily integrating existing software components into new applications. It is based on a recognition that a computer software system includes interdependent collections of software components. That is, at the architectural level, software components and their interdependencies are two distinct and equally important entities. The software components represent the core functional pieces of an application and deal with concepts specific to an application domain. Interdependencies relate to concepts which are orthogonal to the problem domain of most applications, such as transportation, sharing of resources and synchronization constraints among components.
An architectural design language is provided which has linguistic support for representing and transforming software architecture diagrams. This language enables a clear separation of the core functional pieces of an application, herein called activities, and their interconnection relationships in context of the application, herein called dependencies. The language also supports entity specialization, a mechanism through which software architectures can be described at various levels of abstraction.
In addition, a design handbook of dependency types and associated coordination processes is provided. Such a handbook is based on the observation that many interconnection problems and software applications are related to a relatively narrow set of concepts, such as resource flows, resource sharing, and timing dependencies. These concepts are orthogonal to the problem domain of most applications, and can therefore be captured in an application independent vocabulary of dependency types. Similarly, the design of associated coordination processes involves a relatively narrow set of coordination concepts, such as shared events, invocation mechanisms, and communication protocols. Therefore, coordination processes can also be captured in a design space that assists designers in designing a coordination process that manages a given dependency type, simply by selecting the value of a relatively small number of design dimensions. The design handbook combines the vocabulary of dependencies in a design space of coordination processes. Such a handbook may reduce the specification and implementation of software component interdependencies to a routine design problem, capable of being assisted, or even automated, by computer tools.
A process for constructing and transforming architectural diagrams of software architectures to integrate executable design elements into code modules is also provided. The process involves applying a series of transformations to an architectural description of a target application. This architectural description may be
Dellarocas Chrysanthos Nicholas
Malone Thomas W.
Chaki Kakali
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Wolf Greenfield & Sacks P.C.
Zhen Wei
LandOfFree
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