A Reflection-Based Approach for Reusing Software Architecture

Reusing software architecture, which is a kind of coarse-grained software resources at design time, is always a very difficult problem in the realm of software engineer. We consider that the lack of information and techniques, which support the process of reusing software architecture, may result in this problem. So this paper proposes an approach, called ArchBean, which can provide information and technical support for the reuse of architectural level design. ArchBean includes two important basic constituents: RIM4RSA--reflective information model for reusing software architecture and R-ADL. In this paper, we firstly introduce RIM4RSA which can provide information support for creation of reusable architecture resource by modeling architectural information and meta-information. Then we illustrate an architecture description language, called R-ADL, which can provide technical support for description of the reusable software architecture constructed in term of RIM4RSA. Moreover, we demonstrate the main implementation processes of ArchBean.