Engineering a Coordination Architectural Tool for Volatile System Development

Abstract

Software evolution is, norm and even more, a critical concern for most software systems. Despite of many promises that supported by the software development techniques, such as Object-Oriented approach, but they were not able to address these concerns appropriately. Separating static and dynamic concerns of software development helps developers to get a conceptual grasp on large software systems, and evolve it. We are interested in separating three generic concerns (3Cs) that are computation, coordination, and configuration, each layer is superposed in a non-intrusive way on the layer below, which facilitates the modification of coordination and configuration policies to make the system evolved. Using coordination contract concept in specified framework or domain provides us with a consistent database (library) of contracts that can be reused to support expected evolution of systems efficiently. In this thesis a through investigation was made for Coordination Development Environment (CDE) tool, which supports the superposition of contracts on top of Java components to develop and superpose new behaviours or business rules. On top of the CDE a complementary tool (the Spider tool) for volatile system development was developed The Spider tool extends the functionality of the CDE by providing the facility to build versions of application or applications simply through a graphical user interface rather than building them by the code. The Spider tool plays and implements the role of configuration layer in the coordination based approach. It composes any system by draging the components and contracts in plug-and-play manner.