Extendable and Interchangeable Architecture Description of Distributed Systems Using UML and XML

Abstract. Software Architecture can help people to better understand the gross structure and, with powerful analysis techniques, to evaluate the properties of a software system. To accommodate the dynamic changes and facilitate interop-eration of tools, an architectural description of the distributed system should be extensible and interchangeable. In this paper, we utilize the built-in extension mechanism of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) to describe the architec-tures of distributed systems, with the underlying architectural metadata repre-sented in XML. In particular, the approach has been applied to describe the ar-chitectural model of distributed software in the Graph-Oriented Programming framework. The proposed approach has many desirable features, characterized by being visual, easily extendable and interchangeable, and well supported by tools.