Important building blocks of an Architectural Description Language

Software Architectures is an area that started to develop in the beginning of the 1990's. Through Software Architectures, software engineering developers have new improved opportunities for reusing, understanding, communication, analysis etc. To describe Software Architectures, Architecture Description Languages (ADLs) were proposed in the middle of the 1990's. There is not yet any common well-accepted definition of what an ADL really is. There are two tracks however; the first consider that an ADL's primary role is to provide formal syntax and a lower level of semantics; the second approach means that communication and understanding is the most important part for an ADL to play. Because of the lack of a common definition, numerous ADLs have been developed, each with their own strengths and weaknesses and all reflecting their developers' view on what an ADL is. The problem with these ADLs is that they work in a standalone fashion and can not use the facilities of the other ADLs. ACME has been developed to solve this problem. ACME is an Architecture Description Interchange Language, which means that it can serve as a bridge between different ADLs, i.e. that one ADL can use the features of another ADL. There are some software engineering researchers that consider ACME not to be an ADL, since ACME is the least common denominator of the present ADLs and is according to the researchers therefore not an ADL in itself. Therefore, in this report we will first compare ACME with other ADLs, and then present what features ACME needs to add to its environment to become an ADL