[subscribers-software] PrePrint: A Principled Way of Using Frameworks in Architectural Design: A number of methods...

[subscribers-software] PrePrint: A Principled Way of Using Frameworks in Architectural Design: A number of methods...

A number of methods have appeared in the past decade to support and codify architectural design. However, an issue that hampers the adoption of such methods in practice is that they use abstract concepts such as views, tactics and patterns, while the concepts that software architects use in their day-to-day work come from commercial frameworks such as JSF, Spring or Hibernate. In this article we present a holistic and more realistic approach to architectural design to address this disconnect. The approach uses, and systematically links, both "top-down concepts" such as patterns and tactics, and implementation artifacts such as frameworks, which are "bottom-up concepts". Thus, it reduces the mismatch between abstract concepts and the technical ones used by architects in their everyday work. We illustrate the approach via a case study and we discuss our experiences of its us...

Full article: http://www.computer.org/csdl/mags/so/preprint/mso20129901...