A Declarative Approach to Architectural Reflection

Recent research shows runtime architectural reflection is instrumental in, for instance, building adaptive and flexible systems or checking correspondence between design and implementation. Moreover, experience with computational reflection in various branches of computer science shows that the interface through which the meta-information of the running system is accessed, and possibly modified, lies at the heart of designing reflective systems. This paper proposes that such an interface should be like a database: accessed through queries expressed using the concepts with which architecture is described. Specifically, our contributions are: (1) a presentation of the general idea of a query-based approach to architectural reflection, (2) a definition of an Architectural Query Language (AQL) in which perspectives on an architectural model can be expressed as queries, (3) a prototype of a system which both creates runtime models of specific distributed architectures and allow for evaluation of AQL queries on these models. We illustrate the viability of the approach in two particular applications of such a model: constraint checking relative to an architectural style, and reasoning about certain quality attributes of an architecture.