Automatic Control Flow Generation from Software Architectures

Kung-Kiu Lau and Vladyslav Ukis
School of Computer Science, The University of Manchester
Manchester M13 9PL, United Kingdom
kung-kiu,vukis@cs.man.ac.uk

Abstract:

In a traditional software architecture, control originates in components
and flows to other components via connectors. The system's control flow 
is fixed at design time, when components and their inter-connections
are specified. Code generated from the design inherits this control 
flow, and consists of component code and glue code that tightly 
couples connected components. This means that code generated from 
a given software architecture is system-specific, and is therefore 
neither generic nor reusable. In this paper we describe an approach 
which allows separate reuse of component code and connector code, and 
thus making it possible to build architectures from pre-existing
components and generic connectors. Furthermore, we  show we can
implement such architectures by generating control flow at run-time
automatically.