Sunday, December 12, 2010

Modeling software systems: data centric, and then what?

For many years I favored a declarative data centric view to software architecture: Graphs with a compositional hierarchy were my mantra. I once explained that these design were like the one ring in the lord of the ring: “One pattern to rule them all and in the design simply them”.

Yet in the end I have changed my beliefs. I now favor a more “equation solving” view to modeling. I find more and more, and especially in the context of real time automation that the models are inherently “sustained” between a data centric model and what I call a dynamic model, which is easier to describe differently. I find easiest to describe dynamic properties as domain specific type theories in a functional framework. These are expressed as DSL with ad hoc types and type inference solvers.