ACME: A Basis for Architecture Exchange
Abstract
The Acme project began with the goal of providing a common language that could be used to support the interchange of architectural descriptions between a variety of design tools. It remains useful in that role, but since the project's inception the Acme language and its support toolkit have grown into a solid foundation upon which new software architecture design and analysis tools can be built without the need to rebuild standard infrastructure. The Acme Language and the Acme Tool Developer's Library (AcmeLib) provide a generic, extensible infrastructure for describing, representing, generating, and analyzing software architecture descriptions. They provide three fundamental capabilities: (1) a generic interchange format for architectural designs, allowing architectural tool developers to readily integrate their tools with other complementary tools; (2) an extensible foundation and infrastructure, allowing tool builders to avoid needlessly rebuilding standard tooling infrastructure for describing, storing, and manipulating architectural designs; and (3) a useful architecture description language in its own right, providing a straightforward set of language constructs for describing architectural structure, architectural types and styles, and annotated properties of the architectural elements. (22 refs.)
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Dec 01, 2003
- Accession Number
- ADA420893
Entities
People
- David Garlan
- David S. Wile