Architectural Mismatch or Why It's Hard to Build Systems Out Of Existing Parts

13 years 8 months ago

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Many would argue that future breakthroughs in software productivity will dependon our ability to combine existing pieces of software to produce new applications. An important step towards this goal is the development of new techniques to detect and cope with mismatches in the assembledparts. Some problems of composition are due to low-level issues of interoperability, such as mismatches in programming languages or database schemas. However, in this paper we highlight a different, and in many waysmore pervasive, class of problem: architectural mismatch. Speciﬁcally, we use our experience in building a family of software design environments from existing parts to illustrate a variety of types of mismatch that center around the assumptions a reusable part makes about the structure of the application in which is to appear. Based on this experience we show how an architectural view of the mismatch problem exposes some fundamental, thorny problems for software composition and suggests pos...

David Garlan, Robert Allen, John Ockerbloom

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