A common approach to defining architectural views is to have independent heterogeneous representations that are tailored to each view's purpose, but this makes reconciling views into an overall architectural description harder. In this paper we put forward a complementary (not alternative) approach in which some views are derived from a given architecture description language (ADL) in a systematic way, by listing the design questions each view should answer. The approach is based on constructing the language's metamodel and extending it with the entities and associations needed to capture and explicitly relate the required views.

CommUnity proposes a formal approach to software architecture. It uses a parallel program design language in the style of Unity programs (Chandy and Misra, 1988), combining elements from IP (Francez and Forman, 1996). The concepts of software architecture - including configuration, connection, connector, component, instantiation - are clearly defined. CommUnity was initially developed to show how programs fit into Goguen's categorical approach to general systems theory. Since then, the language and its framework have been extended to provide a formal platform for the architectural design of open and reconfigurable systems (Fiadeiro et al., 2003). This paper describes an extension of a previous demo we presented at ICSE'02 (Wermelinger and Oliveira, 2002). This extension concerns: connectors; a graphical mode to visualize and/or update interactions; an expert utility to save the whole architecture or just some connectors as a textual specification which can then be easily read without the tool; the distribution and mobility constructs.

Community is a formal approach to software architecture. Its main characteristics are: a precise, yet intuitive mathematical semantics based on categorical diagrams; a clear separation between computation, coordination, and distribution (including mobility); and a simple state-based language, inspired by Unity, to describe behaviour. This paper discusses the applicability of this approach to location-aware systems through the modelling of the GSM handover protocol, namely the way communication with a moving cellular phone passes from one station to another. The case study was developed with the Community Workbench, a tool that animates distributed and mobile architectural models.

No abstract available.