Sonata: Flexible connections between interaction and business spaces

Every interactive system features a functional core and a user interface. Over the years, several types of software architectures for connecting these conceptual elements have been proposed, all of which fail to conciliate two essential qualities: enabling both business and interaction objects reuse, and limiting the amount of communication-specific code in reusable objects.We have described in previous work the Symphony Architecture, which bridges the gap between the interaction and business spaces, while requiring no code overhead in either business or interaction objects. Resulting development features minimal coupling between technology-agnostic business and interaction constructs, called Symphony Objects, and improves their reusability by clearly isolating them from the applicative logic and from technical objects.In this paper, we present an original software framework, called Sonata, which capitalizes on the conventions used for building and organizing Symphony Architecture instances, for minimizing the amount of configuration required for setting up connections between the business and interaction spaces.

► Clarified the use of the term ‘component’: added a definition from the IS domain when describing the concepts used in the Symphony method, and replaced ‘component’ by ‘object’ in most of the paper.
► Clarified the position of Sonata as a framework composed of a runtime library and a model-driven toolchain.
► Added several details on the technologies used in our work.
► Added details in the evaluation section, especially regarding the amount of code automatically generated for the EDEMOI project.