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.