Authors:
Mohamed Hadj Kacem
1
;
Mohamed Jmaiel
1
;
Ahmed Hadj Kacem
1
and
Khalil Drira
2
Affiliations:
1
University of Sfax, laboratory LARIS-FSEGS, Tunisia
;
2
LAAS-CNRS, France
Keyword(s):
ADL, dynamic configuration of architectures, behaviour of applications, component, configuration.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Information Systems Analysis and Specification
;
Modeling Formalisms, Languages and Notations
;
Modeling of Distributed Systems
;
Software Engineering
Abstract:
This paper presents an evaluation study of Architecture Description Languages (ADL) which allows to compare the expressive power of these languages for specifying the dynamicity of software architectures. Our investigation enabled us to release two categories of ADLs: configuration languages and description languages. Here, we address both categories, and we focus on two aspects: the behaviour of software components and the evolution of the architecture during execution. In addition, we explain how each ADL handles these aspects and demonstrate that they are generally not or not enough dealt with by most of the ADLs. This motivates future extensions to be undertaken in this domain. Throughout this paper, we illustrate the comparison of these two aspects by describing an example of a distributed application for collaborative authoring support.