An Extensible ADL for Service-Oriented Architectures

While architecture description languages (ADLs) have gained wide acceptance in the research community as a means of describing system designs, the uptake within the service-oriented architecture (SOA) domain 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 chapter describes ALI, a new ADL that aims to address these deficiencies by providing a rich, extensible and flexible syntax for describing component and service interface types and the use of patterns and meta-information. These enhanced capabilities are intended to encourage more widespread ADL usage.