Extending programming environments to support architectural design

As software systems grow in size and complexity, the demand for languages and tools to capture higher order abstractions than those supported by programming languages increases. One of these abstractions is the architectural design, which specifies a system´s components, their interfaces, and their interrelationships using textual or visual notations. Although there have been significant advances in programming languages and environments, research into languages and tools for architectural design is still preliminary. Moreover there has been little emphasis on integrating design tools with existing programming environments. The paper describes how the Object Oriented Turing programming environment was extended to accommodate languages and tools for specifying and visualizing architectural designs