Architecture Styles: Do they Need Different Notations?

Styles or patterns for software architectures look very different. Any of them seems to open a new world. We try to discuss the commonalities by tracing them back to the traditional approach for software architectures used in this book. We do this for some cases and hope that the reader is convinced that it can also be done for the remaining ones. We are sure that the discussion how to trace back can also be conducted for other approaches of ‘standard’ software architectures. As a result, we see that styles/ patterns, although looking different at first sight, have a lot in common with classical concepts. In this chapter, we concentrate on styles. Tracing back a style notation N to a ‘standard notation’ NS is done for three different modes: In some cases (example data flow) the notation NS is more detailed and delivers more accuracy than N. In other cases (event or distribution architectures) written down in a more technical notation, NS is more abstract. Finally, N and NS can be on a similar level of abstraction (N-Tier, Blackboard), but NS is again more precise. So, the answer to the question of the title is No \( \underline{and} \) Yes.