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Defining Software Components PDF Print E-mail

Software Components, in the Essential Meta Model, capture the major or important elements of software that provide the functional behaviour of applications. This short tutorial introduces Software Components and describes how they are defined in Essential Architecture Manager.

Each Application Provider has a High Level Software Architecture in Essential Architecture Manager, which relates the Application Provider to the Software Components that it is made up of. Each Application Provider should have at least one Software Component defined in this High Level Software Architecture.

Software Components can be captured at a very coarse grain - e.g. it is perfectly valid for an Application Provider to have a High Level Software Architecture that has a single Software Component in it.

Software Components and the High Level Software Architecture focus on capturing the architectural view of the software components. Detailed software design is handed over to software engineering tools

Purpose 

Software provides the link between Applications and Technology, delivering functional behaviour and running on specific technology. 

Software Components capture the relevant software elements that must be managed in the Enterprise Architecture. For many packaged application solutions, we capture a single Software Component for that package – treating it as a black-box. For more complex packaged solutions you may wish to capture the major moving parts as separate Software Components. 

Tasks 

To define a Software Component:

  • Give the component a name and description 
  • Specify the relevant software architecture layer that this component operates in 
  • Specify the software run time technology of the component, e.g.
    • Java JVM
    • .NET framework
  • Specify the Technology Product that tells the model where this Software Component comes from in the case of packaged solutions.
  • Specify the invocation protocol if appropriate 
  • Specify the application functionality that this software component provides by selecting the relevant Application Function Implementations. 

 

 

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