Market drivers to deliver software-based business solutions faster and cheaper have promoted the evolution of software system architectures toward assemblies of encapsulated components offering well-defined services - a service-oriented architecture. Software vendors are eager to adopt and exploit new technologies, such as XML and Web services, to meet the market demands, but face significant challenges due to their existing software asset base and entrenched development processes. This paper presents a case study of the use of a methodology and toolset, known as CAIDE (Computer Aided Interface Design Environment), developed to address these challenges for a complex family of telecommunications applications. Our main objective was to provide a simple but expressive high-level meta-model for specifying system interfaces, and to automatically generate XML schemas for the interfaces consistently across the application family, constraining the use of schema constructs according to enterprise-wide policies, and promoting reuse by composition.

One of the goals of software architecture research is to analyze the reliability of a software system early in the development lifecycle. This allows the system designers to predict reliability and evaluate alternative designs. This paper presents a methodology and accompanying toolset, Workflow-to-SDL-Direct-Simulation (W2S), for generating a simulator from a semi-formal architecture description. This simulator allows the analysis of the system's reliability based on the simulated behavior and performance. There are three steps in the W2S methodology: translation of the description to a communicating extended finite state machine (CEFSM) model; generation of a simulator from the CEFSM model and a model of the system environment; and execution of the simulator on top of an underlying CEFSM engine. The W2S methodology was applied to a Bellcore telecommunication control system, using a set of tools that we developed. Several sets of experiments were carried out. The result shows that the information generated by the simulator can be used to predict the reliability of a system solely based on its architectural description. This prediction allows designers to select more reliable architectures.

Attribute grammars add specification of static semantic properties to context-free grammars, which, in turn, describe the syntactic structure of program units. However, context-free grammars cannot express programming-in-the-large features common in modern programming languages, including unordered collections of units, included units, and sharing of included units. We present extensions to context-free grammars, and corresponding extensions to attribute grammars, suitable for defining such features. We explain how batch and incremental attribute-evaluation algorithms can be adapted to support these extensions, resulting in a uniform approach to intraunit and interunit static semantic analysis and translation of multiunit programs.

A solution to the problem of incremental attribute evaluation for multiple asynchronous subtree replacements that is applicable to arbitrary noncircular attribute grammars is discussed. The algorithm supports multiple independent editing cursors. Concurrent evaluation processes proceed independently as long as they cover disjoint regions of the derivation tree. Evaluation processes are merged when they overlap, to prevent unnecessary attribute evaluations. The complexity of these three parts of the algorithm is discussed. The algorithm ensures that when evaluation terminates, the tree is consistently attributed. The results solve two open problems that arose in connection with the original algorithm for asynchronous subtree replacements reported by S.M. Kaplan and G.F. Kaiser (1986).>