Abstract:

The advantages of distributed softwaresystems in terms of additional reliability, redundancy, work load balancing etc. are easily outweighed by the additional complexity distribution introduces into a software architecture. In this report we consider our approach to describe the architecture of distributed software systems. This approach is based on a component model of software which contains additional information about distribution. Rather than describing the distribution properties within a component most of these properties are stated with the use relation between components which may be local or remote. We describe how this design approach can be implemented on top of the Object Management Groups CORBA standard (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) and how performance-related properties of remote use relations are used to quantitatively assess the software architecture. Thus the design of complex, hierarchically structured distributed software systems can be assessed wrt. response time of remote operation invocations, for example.