What is Architecture-Centric Development

Service-oriented architectures have, over the last decade, gradually become more important. The vast diversity of implementation and support platforms for this kind of architecture increases the complexity of the processes used to develop service-based systems. The task of specifying service architectures can be eased by following a model-driven approach and the appropriate model notations. In this chapter, the authors explore the architectural properties of the service-oriented paradigm and present part of a framework for the specification of service-oriented software architectures. The main idea is to use the separation into different abstraction levels fostered by the MDA proposal and tackle the software architecture specification progressively, stepping from conceptual to platform-specific levels. This chapter particularly concentrates upon describing UML profiles for the PIM and PSM levels of service-oriented architectural models, along with their corresponding metamodels. The use of the proposed profiles is illustrated in a case study in which the proposed profiles are implemented.