Web-based tool support for dynamic management of distribution and parallelism in integrating architecture design and performance evaluation

Abstract

We introduce a light weight approach to support the development of parallel and distributed software systems over the World Wide Web. Our approach considers a highly distributed development process by multiple collaborating agents, it covers architecture design and architecture analysis right to implementation generation and dynamic accommodation of evolutionary change. The foundation of our approach is an architecture description language which supports separation between the independent development of loosely coupled and distributed software components containing multiple parallel control flows from the interconnection and configuration of such components. While the developer is provided with a local light weight front end tool for editing an architecture specification, a set of analysis tools are realized as back end services offered by specialized servers. These tools not only allow to check syntactic and semantic properties but also allow to assess a given architecture w.r.t. quantitative properties like performance.