Design of a Communication Framework for Interoperable Information Systems

Abstract

Frameworks are class hierarchies plus models of interactions which can be turned into complete applications through various kinds of specialization. Design patterns often guide the construction and documentation of frameworks. The run-time architecture of a framework is characterized by an inversion of control: event handler objects of the application are invoked via the framework's reactive dispatching mechanism. This paper reports the development process of a software architecture that has been designed for accomplishing the transfer of operation specifications among interoperable information systems within a larger project, such that · the communication framework does not need to know the structure and different types of operation specifications to be transferred and · the individual information systems do not need to know the communication platform (in our case CORBA). Some design patterns guided the construction of the resulting object-oriented framework to achieve a flexible software architecture. The emphasis of this paper is on the discussion of the development process by which the communication framework has been designed.