Thoughts on ArchJava: Connecting Software Architecture to Implementation

Although the title of the paper was about connecting architecture with implementation, the authors cleverly narrowed down the scope to a manageable subarea: communication integrity. I believe this is the right approach for the first phase of a grand topic as interface between components are certainly important and they are more tangible and thus much easier to enforce automatically than other aspects as design guidelines.

Two problems immediately come into mind, since the approach ArchJava requires annotating the source code, could it be done on the existing or the leveraged code? The authors's experience suggested that this answer is yes, although it did require quite a bit of effort; on the positively side this provided a refactoring opportunity. Second, could it be easily adapted to other languages? For starters, a separate effort is needed to produce a compiler for that each language to recognize the new annotations. I'm also not sure whether it can map well to non-OO languages such as C.