Domain Specific Languages for Maintaining and Analyzing Changes in Event-Based Architectures

A main characteristic of event-driven architectures is that components are highly decoupled, which facilitates high flexibility, scalability and concurrency of distributed systems. This intrinsic loose coupling of components introduces the challenge to identify dependencies between the components, which have to be known to developers to analyze, maintain, and evolve an event-based architecture. The knowledge about component´s dependencies is often hard to gain due to the absence of explicit information about these dependencies. Furthermore, assisting techniques for analyzing the impacts of certain changes are missing, hindering the implementation of changes in event-driven architectures. In this paper we present a novel approach to support developers in evolving event-based architectures by using model-based domain specific languages for describing changes at different levels of abstraction. The DSLs´ models are used to support analysis of specific changes to increase the quality of the evolving event based systems architecture.