Comparing architecture description languages for mobile software systems

Software architecture is a technique which aids the development of complex and dynamic systems. Architecture Description Languages (ADLs) describe software architectures using a textual syntax or a graphical notation. However, not many ADLs have provided primitives for describing software architectures of distributed and mobile software systems. This paper presents a comparison among existing ADLs that have addressed distributed and mobile software systems. The features chosen for the comparison have been taken from the work of Roman et al. [15] which propose a framework for viewing mobility. The features taken into account in this work are how ADLs support the notion of location, mobility, coordination, middleware, a graphical notation, and tools. The work presented in this paper proposes to be a starting point for discovering whether ADLs have properly supported mobility or not