Package-oriented software engineering: a generic architecture

New methodologies and better techniques are the rule in software engineering, and users of large and complex methodologies benefit greatly from specialized software support tools. However, developing such tools is both difficult and expensive, because developers must implement a lot of functionality in a short time. A promising solution is component-based software development, in particular package-oriented programming (POP). POP fails, however, to satisfy all the requirements of large, complex software engineering tasks. A more generic POP architecture would better serve the development of software engineering environments for large and complex methodologies. Such an architecture emerged from our development experiences with two software engineering research tools: Holmes, a domain analysis support tool; and Egidio, a unified-modeling-language-based business modeling tool. We found this particular architecture simple to understand, easy to implement, and a natural candidate for a generic POP architecture. Our generic architecture satisfies the additional requirements we deem important for larger, more complex software engineering activities. Our experiences show that the strength of this architecture lies in its simplicity and ability to work with multiple users and quickly integrate a wide variety of applications. It is not perfect, but we present it as a first step toward a more general package-oriented architecture to encourage further research in this area.