The impact of component architectures on interoperability

Component interoperability has become an important concern as companies migrate legacy systems, integrate COTS products, and assemble modules from disparate sources into a single application. While middleware is available for this purpose, it often does not form a complete bridge between components and may be inflexible as the application evolves. What is needed is the explicit design information that will forecast a more accurate, evolvable, and less costly integration solution implementation. Emerging research has shown that interoperability problems can be traced to the software architecture of the components and integrated application. Furthermore, the solutions generated for these problems are guided by an implicit understanding of software architecture. Current technology does not fully identify what must be made explicit about software architecture to aid in comparison of the architectures and expectations of participating entities within the integrated application. Thus, there can be no relief in the expense or the duration of implementing long-term reliance on middleware. The overall goal of our research is to extract and make explicit the information needed to define and build this technology. This paper focuses on identifying, classifying, and organizing characteristics that help to define an architectural style by using abstraction and semantic nets. We illustrate the relationships between the characteristics and their relevance to interoperability via examples of integrated applications. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.