Exploiting architectural style to develop a family of applications

Reuse of large-grain software components offers the potential for significant savings in application development cost and time. Successful reuse of components and component substitutability depend both on the qualities of the components reused as well as the software context in which the reuse is attempted. Disciplined approaches to the structure and design of software applications offer the potential of providing a hospitable setting for such reuse. The authors present the results of a series of exercises designed to determine how well off-the-shelf constraint solvers could be reused in applications designed in accordance with the C2 software architectural style. The exercises involved the reuse of SkyBlue and Amulet's one-way formula constraint solver. The authors constructed numerous variations of a single application, i.e. an application family. The paper summarises the style and presents the results from the exercises. The exercises were successful in a variety of dimensions; one conclusion is that the C2 style offers significant potential for the development of application families