Architectural Description Languages and their Role in Component Based Design

Architecture description languages (ADLs) are widely used to describe system architectures. Bass et. al. (1988) describe the main features of these languages. Components and connectors are the main elements of ADLs and include rules and guidelines for well formed architectures. The output of the architecture description process is the system architecture documents. This consists of a number of graphical representations of the system model along with associated descriptive text. It should describe how the system is structured into sub-systems and how each sub-system is structured into components. Each component is described based on many properties such as behaviour [1].