The last decade has been one of great progress in the field of software architecture research and practice. Software architecture has emerged as an important subdis- pline of software engineering. A key aspect of the design of any software system is its architecture, i. e. the fundamental organization of a system embodied in its com- nents, their relationships to each other, and to the environment, and the principles guiding its design and evolution (as defined in the Recommended Practice for Arc- tectural Description of Software-Intensive Systems -- IEEE Std 1471-2000). - The First European...