Architectural Issues in Software Reuse: It's Not Just the Functionality, It's the Packaging

Author: Mary Shaw

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Abstract

Effective reuse depends not only on finding and reusing components, but also on the ways those components are combined. The informal folklore of software engineering provides a number of diverse styles for organizing software systems. These styles, or architectures, show how to compose systems from components; different styles expect different kinds of component packaging and different kinds of interactions between the components. Unfortunately, these styles and packaging distinctions are often implicit; as a consequence, components with appropriate functionality may fail to work together. This talk surveys common architectural styles, including important packaging and interaction distinctions, and proposes an approach to the problem of reconciling architectural mismatches.

Brought to you by the Composable Software Systems Research Group in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.