Section: Scientific Foundations

Introduction

Our approach to the construction of adaptable, dependable and manageable distributed systems is architecture-based . “Architecture-based” means that a system software architecture (and its associated component-base structure) plays a pivotal role for enabling adaptations and management operations, which are seen primarily as actions inducing architectural changes in a system.

Our approach to system construction relates to, and builds on results in several research fields in computer science, mostly: component-based software engineering, software architecture, reflective systems and languages, programming languages, concurrency theory, type systems, distributed algorithms, operating systems, distributed systems and middleware, autonomic computing. In what follows, we (briefly) discuss some of these connections, mention relevant litterature, and point at open issues that are relevant to Sardes ' work.