A reference architecture for visually managing metadata-based components

• Main Author: José Roberto Campos Perillo
• Other Authors: Clovis Torres Fernandes
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica 2014
• Subjects: Estruturas (processamento de dados); Ferramentas de desenvolvimento de software; Metadados; Controle de acesso; Programação orientada para objetos; Engenharia de software
• Online Access: http://www.bd.bibl.ita.br/tde_busca/arquivo.php?codArquivo=3174

Developing component-based applications has always been a big challenge faced for software developers and architects. In the last 25 years, many metadata-based component models were proposed, and most of them include tools that allow controlling the lifecycle of components. However, it was not observed in the academy or in the industry an architecture or a model that can serve as abstraction for tools capable of visually managing metadata-based components and their relationships with other components. In this work, a reference architecture is proposed for such purpose. Tools based on it will provide developers, architects and systems administrators with better control over applications that make use of metadata-based components. For validation purposes, it is presented the Saturnus tool, which implements the proposed architecture and controls components of Spring DM-based applications. The "Management Application" is also presented as a proof of concept-it is a Spring DM-based application that was gradually evolved with Saturnus. After implementing both Saturnus and the "Management Application", it is possible to say that proposing such an architecture is feasible and that it is possible to visualize the organization of components in terms of graphs in tools that implement it, and also that these tools can effectively control metadata-based components and their relationships with each other, as well as their lifecycle. Consequently, it is now possible to have better control over the architecture of applications that make use of metadata-based components, tools able to control metadata-based components can now be created, metadata-based component models tend to be more used as other architectures or models able to support component-based development are proposed and now Spring DM-based applications can be better controlled with the help of Saturnus.