Today is the last day of my five-week architecture project at AspenTech. We have completed a very flexible and extensible architecture design with a working prototype for highly integrated desktop application framework and runtime infrastructure used in the process control and online optimiation applications.

At its core, it’s so-called Plugin concept that enables the runtime to be configured based on meta data. The runtime starts with an empty stack with some minimal bootstrap to discover and load the plugins. All the application functionalities are provided by the plugins. The plugins can work together based on the meta data instructions.

We have provided a set of default plugins to interpret the meta data, support a sophiscated GUI interface that utilizes the Model-View-Control design pattern. There’s a default Undo/Redo stack. All operations can be undone/redone. The object persistence is available as well.

The techniques used are XML seralization, object serialization, reflection, code generation, dynamic evaluation, etc. The prototype is implemented in C#. We have been using Extreme Programming and Pair Programming via Net Meeting all the time. The results are very good.