Architectural Styles for Early Goal-driven Middleware Selection
Simon Giesecke, Matthias Röhr, Wilhelm Hasselbring · European Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs · 2008
The selection of a middleware platform is an important task in the development of complex business information systems. A systematic selection aims to ensure that the resulting system meets its specified quality requirements. The selection must be made early, since it significantly influences the software architecture and later changes to the architecture are expensive. In our approach, middleware platforms are explicitly described by architectural styles, which capture the design vocabulary and structural constraints the platform imposes upon concrete application architectures. This novel combination of architectural styles and middleware platform selection has the benefit that the selected style provides partial guidance for modelling the application architecture based on the chosen middleware platform. We present the MidArch method for systematic middleware platform selection exploiting a style repository which stores results of architectural evaluations from applications of the method. We present an example of applying the method in the development of a web-based information system, in the context of a field case study.