Coordination in Architectural Connection. Reflective and Aspectual Introduction

Abstract

Coordination is an essential, architecture-level concern, which defines a pattern of behaviour scattered throughout architectural connections. Architecture Description Languages should be able to separate this concern and make it explicit. We propose to describe this coordination model as a set of specific components, which will be introduced into architectural connections to influence their behaviour. Two approaches are discussed: the first one defines reflection as a new architectural dimension, while the second one provides a conceptually simpler aspectual perspective. To show that these approaches are feasible, we provide an example using both techniques, where an initial pipeline-style architecture is extended by introducing a coordination infrastructure which encapsulates the classic Paxos consensus algorithm.