An Infrastructure for the Rapid Development of XML-based Architecture Description Languages

1
An Infrastructure for the Rapid Development of
XML-based Architecture Description Languages

• Dashofy-Hoek-Taylor02
• Presented by Ares Saldana
• March 11, 2008

2
What is the Problem?

• Many and many ADL keep emerging.
• No real unification nor consensus of what and ADL
  should consist of
• Architects write their own ADL to accommodate
  their domain.

3
What is the Solution?

• An XML-based infrastructure for the rapid
  development of ADLs
• It consists of
• an XML-based modular extension mechanism for
  rapidly developing new ADLs
• a base set of features that can be reused in ADL
  development and
• a flexibler set of tools to support ADL
  evelopment and use

4
Other considerations

• Importance of Support Tools
• Enforcement of semantic consistency with ADL not
  provided

5
Characteristics

• Scalability
• Adaptability and Extensibility
• Concept Capture

6
Architectural Emphasis

• Distributed Architectures
• Integrating Architectures
• Dynamic Architectures
• Product Line Architectures

7
Justification

• Most ADLs are monolithic
• Changes are not easy
• Tool support
• Cost

8
XML

• Broad support from standard bodies. (W3C)
• Compatibility
• Suitable for developing modular and extensible
  notations.

9
Approach

• XML-based language to describe ADLs
• A base set of schemas
• A flexible tool support

10
XML Schemas and Extensibility

• Hybrid DTD
• XML Schema standard
• Each Module as a Schema

11
XLM and ADLs

• XML does not guarantee syntactic compatibility
  between modules.
• A get-a-way solution for this is Artificial
  Dependencies. However this reduces orthogonality.
  
• XML cannot describe semantics, by this requiring
  Semantically-aware tools.

12
xADL v 2.0

• Collection of schemas
• Very general. Do NOT describe behavior
• but can be specified using extension schemas

13
Characteristics of a xADL derived ADL

• Separation of run-time and design-time models of
  a software system.
• Implementation mappings that map the ADL
  specification of an architecture onto executable
  code
• The ability to model aspects of architectural
  evolution and product line architectures.

14
INSTANCES or xArch

• Constructs while modeling Run-Time architectures.
  
• Component Instances
• Connector Instances
• Interface Instances
• Link Instances
• Sub-architectures
• General Groups

15
Structure and Types Schema

• Components
• Connectors
• Interfaces
• Sub-architectures
• Links
• General Groups
• Component Types
• Connector types
• interface types

16
Advantages

• Typing
• Allows the architect to reason about similarities
  among elements of the same type.
• Run and Design-time can be extended separately

17
Implementation Mappings

• Not platform specific
• Where but not what data location
• xADL Abstract Implementation Schema

18
Modeling Architectural Evolution and Product Lines

• Versions
• Options
• Variants

19
Tool Support

• Provide parsing, syntax checking, and
  syntax-directed editing based on ADL schemas.
• XML Spy
• Apache Xerces
• Apigen
• xArchADT
• ArchEdit

20
Real World Experience

• AWACS
• JPL
• MAppings to Koala Mae

21
Related Work

• Traditional and Domain-Specific ADLs
• XML-based ADLs
• UML

22
Conclusions

• Infrastructure for developing ADLs with reduced
  effort and time.
• No parsers, allowing to address other problems
  (research)

23
Future work

• ArchDiff - To see the differences between two
  architectures
• Investigate Issues related to distributed,
  dynamic software architectures, as well as
  applying architecture-based development to areas
  of the life-cycle such as deployment and
  maintenance

24
Thank you

• Questions?