Resumen
The article discusses an environment that facilitates the design and quality analysis of flexible and configurable middleware architectures, providing three main features, architecture description language, repository of architectural descriptions, and automated tool support. Existing middleware infrastructures provide highly flexible and reusable functionality that can be composed in various ways toward satisfying certain non-functional requirements. But mastering and exploiting this flexibility is time consuming and problematic, even for middleware experts. That is an environment is being developed to facilitate the modeling, composition and quality analysis of middleware components and architectures. Developers have been experimenting with the environment on real-world cases in the context of European Commission's Dependable Systems of Systems project. They are now interested in extending the approach toward the analysis of other aspects of large-scale distributed systems, including maintainability openness and scalability.