A Framework for Describing Software Architectures for Reuse

We present a formal description of software architectures for software reuse to support a view of systematic software reuse as the plugging of components into an architecture. The components are object descriptions in the object calculus. Interconnection between the components is defined via synchronisation morphisms within a framework based on category theory. Component composition is defined via the pushout construction, giving the architecture as a “calculated” component, from which the architecture’s properties may be derived. We show that the architectures described are reusable in our Reuse Triplet that forms the motivation for our on-going work on systematic software reuse. This work provides further support for the suggestion that category theory provides the appropriate level of mathematical abstraction to describe software architectures.