Breeze/ADL: Graph Grammar Support for an XML-Based Software Architecture Description Language

Architecture description languages (ADLs) play an important role in specifying the software architectures. While most of these ADLs are unable to deal with the change directly, especially for dynamic evolution of software systems. This paper proposes an XML-based ADL, named Breeze/ADL, which is supported by Breeze Graph Grammar (BGG) - a graph grammar we defined, to describe software architecture and capture the change in the architecture definition. Our approach is explained in two directions. First, we give the basic definitions of Breeze/ADL, and then show how to map the BGG to Breeze/ADL to specify the structural model, style constraints and dynamic evolution. The other direction is that we use a Client/Server application as a running example to demonstrate our approach throughout this paper. In this approach, the software architecture description has both a textual and a graph representations, and the unplanned change can be captured and defined.