Toolsupportfordevelopingpattern-orientedarchitectures.docVIP

Tool Support for Developing Pattern-Oriented Architectures Sherif M. Yacoub and Hany H. Ammar Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Dept., West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV 26506-6109, USA ABSTRACT Design patterns have recently attracted the interest of researchers and practitioner as reusable proven-solutions to frequent design problems. Deploying these solutions to develop complex information systems is a tedious task that involves integration issues and iterative development. A tool-support for development with patterns will eventually facilitate the analysis and design phases. Current modeling tools do not explicitly support pattern as architecture construct with interfaces. This paper discusses the requirement specification of a visual composition tool that supports the development of object oriented architectures from constructive design patterns. The notion of pattern interfaces is made explicit to integrate patterns at the architecture level. The tool facilitates the development of architectures for information systems such as the Client/Server architecture for distributed medical informatics systems. Current visual modeling languages and their tool support do not explicitly incorporate the new concepts of pattern diagrams and pattern interfaces. The proposed tool supports high-level designs using patterns as design components with interfaces, and integrates with existing tools for lower level designs in terms of class and collaboration diagrams. This paper reports on the specification of a tool support for designing with patterns as architecture constructs. Keywords: Patter-Oriented Architectures, Design Patterns, and Tool-support for patterns. 1. INTRODUCTION Patterns were introduced to document good design practices. For this purpose, much work has been motivated to document new patterns. Patterns represent an abstraction layer below the level of architectures and frameworks, and above the fundamental constructs of object oriented designs