Glossary » ALV architecture

ALV architecture

abstraction-link-view architecture. A technique for building software by developing the application as a user interface (the View), the abstract data and semantics (the Abstraction), and a set of relationships between these parts (the Links).

This technique makes it easy to add many different types of views onto one abstraction, useful in particular for the construction of multi-user interfaces, but also useful for building debugging systems and for software engineering in general enabling user interfaces and underlying applications to be developed relatively independently.

The ALV architecture is similar in spirit to model-view-controller (MVC). ALV differs from MVC in 2 primary ways:

1. ALV is based on a constraint system to manage consistency between the abstraction and view. The links are a special kind of constraint that can create and destroy objects as well as maintain relationships between their values.
2. ALV combines input and output in the view, whereas MVC separates input and output in the view and controller.