13 research outputs found
Towards More Flexible Architecture Description Languages for Industrial Applications
Architecture Description Languages (ADLs) have emerged in recent years as a tool for providing high-level descriptions of software systems in terms of their architectural elements and the relationships among them. Most of the current ADLs exhibit limitations which prevent their widespread use in industrial applications. In this paper, we discuss these limitations and introduce ALI, an ADL that has been developed to address such limitations. The ALI language provides a rich and flexible syntax for describing component interfaces, architectural patterns, and meta-information. Multiple graphical architectural views can then be derived from ALI’s textual notation
Using an Architecture Description Language to Model a Large- Scale Information System – An Industrial Experience Report
An organisation that had developed a large Information System wanted to embark on a programme of significant evolution for the system. As a precursor to this, it was decided to create a comprehensive architectural
description. T his undertaking faced a number of challenges, including a low general awareness of software modelling and software architecture practices . The approach taken for this
project included the definition of a simple, specific, architecture description language. This paper describes the experiences of the project and the ADL created as part of it
Using an Architecture Description Language to Model a Large- Scale Information System – An Industrial Experience Report
An organisation that had developed a large Information System wanted to embark on a programme of significant evolution for the system. As a precursor to this, it was decided to create a comprehensive architectural
description. T his undertaking faced a number of challenges, including a low general awareness of software modelling and software architecture practices . The approach taken for this
project included the definition of a simple, specific, architecture description language. This paper describes the experiences of the project and the ADL created as part of it
ALI: An Extensible Architecture Description Language for Industrial Applications
While Architecture Description Languages (ADLs)
have gained wide acceptance in the research
community as a means of describing system designs,
the uptake in industry has been slower than might have
been expected. A contributory cause may be the
perceived lack of flexibility and, as yet, the limited tool
support. This paper describes ALI, a new ADL that
aims to address these deficiencies by providing a rich,
extensible and flexible syntax for describing
component interface types and the use of patterns and
meta-information. These enhanced capabilities are
intended to encourage more widespread industrial
usage
Case Study: Using ADLARS to Design and Develop a Real-Time Network Emulator
As testing and benchmarking performance of web
services and networked applications has proven to be cost-effective, and crucial in some applications, increased
significance has been attached to the development of hardware
and software network emulators and simulators. In this paper,
we discuss a possible design of a light-weight real-time IP
network emulator that can provide the same functionality and
performance as hardware simulators. Also, as the systematic
software engineering discipline has become a necessity in the
software development life-cycle, we present a possible
approach, utilizing mature software engineering disciplines, for
building the software architecture of the emulator. We then use
ADLARS [1], an Architecture Description Language for Real-time Systems to describe the architecture. The emulator’s
architecture serves as a good test-bed for our ADL because of
its real-time and concurrent nature. We conclude by testing our
design and presenting a possible JAVA implementation of the
emulator over a UNIX system
A Multiple Views Model for Variability Management in Software Product Lines
\With current trends towards moving variability
from hardware to software, and given the increasing
desire to postpone design decisions as much as is
economically feasible, managing the variability from
requirements elicitation to implementation is
becoming a primary business requirement in the
product line process. Nowadays, a medium size
software system may encompass hundreds if not
thousands of variability points introducing a new level
of complexity that current techniques struggle to
manage. In this paper, we present a new approach to
variability management by introducing a multiple
views model (4VM) where each view caters for specific
set of concerns that relate to a particular group of
stakeholders
Modelling large-scale information systems using ADLs – An industrial experience report
An organisation that had developed a large information system wanted to embark on a programme that would involve large-scale evolution of it. As a precursor to this, it was decided to create a comprehensive architectural description to capture and understand the system’s design. This undertaking faced a number of challenges, including a low general awareness of software modelling and software architecture practices. The approach taken by the software architects tasked with this project included the definition of a simple, very specific, architecture description language. This paper reports our experience of the project and a simple ADL that we created as part of it.

Usability of Web Browsers for Multi-touch Platforms
Multi-touch interface is an improvement within the existing touch screen technology, which allows the user to operate the electronic visual display with finger gestures. This work examines how good current web browsers are positioned to avail of the next generation HCI, currently dubbed Natural User Interfaces which are largely multi-touch interfaces at this point in time
The ALI Architecture Description Language
Architecture Description Languages (ADLs) have emerged over the past two decades as a means to abstract details of large-scale systems in order to enable better intellectual control over the complete systems. Recently, there has been an explosion in the number of ADLs created in the research community. However, industrial adoption of these ADLs has been rather limited. This has been attributed to various reasons, including the lack of support of some ADLs for: variability management, requirements traceability, architectural artefact reusability and multiple architectural views. To overcome these limitations, this paper is a report on ALI, an ADL that was designed to complement existing work by adding mechanisms to address the aforementioned limitations. The ALI design principles, concepts, notations and formal semantics are presented in this paper. The notation is illustrated using two distinct case studies, one from the information systems domain " an Asset Management System (AMS); and another from the embedded systems domain - a Wheel Brake System (WBS)