A Reflective Information Model for Reusing Software Architecture

Reusing software architecture, which is a kind of coarse-grained software resources at design time, is always a very difficult problem in the realm of software engineer. We consider that there are two fundamental reasons for this problem: one is the lack of information which supports the process of reusing software architecture; another is the lack of effective reusing approach. So this paper proposes RIM4RSA - reflective information model for reusing software architecture supporting the reuse of architectural level design, which offers the information support for reusing software architecture and its constituents at design time by modeling the meta-information about the base-level to construct a meta-level. Moreover, this paper illustrates the approach to construct meta-level and base-level of the RIM4RSA, and presents the implementation solution of RIM4RSA. At the same time, we put forward an approach for reusing software architecture based on the use of RIM4RSA.