A survey of Software Architecture Description Languages
Pavan Kumar Potaraju
Department of Computer Science
University of Texas at Dallas
Richardson, TX 75083
Abstract
The architecture of a system is one of the most crucial issues in the development of the
system. According to Shaw [Error! Reference source not found.], the software
architecture of a system is an abstract representation of the system’s components, their
interfaces, and constraints on the system.
Shaw and Garlan present a model of architecture based on three abstractions:
 Components: They are independent units of computation.
 Connectors: They represent interactions among components.
 Configurations: They are instance of architectural description represented as a
graph of connectors and components.
Architecture description languages (ADLs) are formal languages that can be used to
represent the architecture of a software system. Architecture description languages
represent a language-based design methodology. ADLs differ from requirements
languages, programming languages and modeling languages. It differs from requirements
languages as it describes the solution spaces and the latter describes problem spaces.
ADL differs from programming languages as the latter bind all architectural abstractions
to specific point solutions where as it intentionally suppress or vary such bindings and it
differs from modeling languages because the latter is more concerned with the behaviors
of the whole rather than the parts where as it concentrates on the representation of
components.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents an overview of software
architecture followed by a description of ADLs. Section3 describes the previous surveys
conducted on ADLs. Section 4 describes a new framework for comparing the various
existing ADLs. Finally, Section 5 presents the conclusions.