Specifying frameworks and design patterns as architectural fragments

Object-oriented software architectures, such as design patterns and frameworks, have found extensive use in software industry. Their implementation in traditional object-oriented programming languages, however, is often difficult, since no support for the explicit specification of software architectures is provided. The author develops the notion of architecture fragments, i.e. reusable architectural specifications that describe a design pattern or a framework architecture. An architectural fragment describes the structure of an architecture in terms of its components (roles), the architecture-specific behaviour of the components and the architecture-specific interaction between the components. Fragments can be composed with each other and with reusable components. To illustrate the use of fragments, the author describes the role and architecture language constructs in the layered object model (L/sup AY/OM) and presents examples.