Separation of concerns in modeling distributed component-based architectures

Building component-based distributed applications is a complex task involving a set of cooperating actors like architects, developers, transactions or persistency specialists. For more than ten years, the Object Management Group (OMG) has defined open standards to build interoperable distributed applications. First, the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) introduced interoperability between heterogeneous distributed objects, object oriented middleware. Now, the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) has introduced interoperability between heterogeneous models, model oriented middleware. In this context, we advocate the separation of concerns in order to structure the modeling and meta modeling of enterprise distributed component architectures. In the meantime, design related knowledge is most often lost at runtime. Nevertheless, this knowledge could be important to reify architectures of applications at runtime and to support their administration and reconfiguration. Thus, we intend to support separation of concerns from design to runtime of applications, using a meta data repository centric approach. This paper discusses our proposal, CODeX, to structure the definition of meta models in order to offer dedicated points of view of a model to each of the actors of the software engineering process, from architects to application administrators.