Configuration specification using a system structure language

A discussion is given on a system modelling language and supporting toolkit which was originally developed as part of the Eclipse software engineering environment. The authors address the modelling of large-scale systems made up of many different types of components. The language, called SySL (system structure language), enables system structure to be described at various levels of abstraction. A toolkit enables changes to the system descriptions to be made consistently, and automates the process of building an executable version of the described system. Using such a language and toolkit, a systems administrator can control the process of dynamically re-configuring a system in a much more effective way. SySL was developed in the first place to support the management of software configurations. The authors have extended the system and are using it in a project investigating the general problems of distributed systems management (G. Dean et al., 1992). The language is also the basis for the configuration language in a European collaborative project which is concerned with providing practical support for dynamic systems evolution. The authors describe some of the features of SySL and illustrate how the language can be used for system configuration specification using an example of a network of workstations. They then describe the toolkit which has been developed to support software configuration management using SySL and initial work on the use of the language in conjunction with a dynamic configuration manager