Archface4COP: architectural interface for context-oriented programming

Context-awareness plays an important role in developing flexible and evolvable applications such as self-* systems (e.g., self-adaptive, self-healing, and self-management systems). However, it is not easy to design and implement such a context-aware system, because its software architecture is dynamically changed. That is, software components constituting a system and their connection structure can be dynamically changed. As a result, it is hard to check whether or not a design model is correctly implemented and its context-dependent behavior is faithful to the design. To deal with this problem, we introduce Archface4COP, an architectural interface mechanism for COP (Context-Oriented Programming). Archface4COP exposes architectural points shared between UML-based design models and code written in COP languages. Architectural points represent COP-specific events such as layer in, layer out, layered message send, and layered message receive. These points are important to represent an abstract structure of software architecture focusing on context-awareness. We can verify whether or not a design model and its code can co-evolve each other by checking an Archface4COP interface.