Acme: Architectural Description of Component-Based Systems

Over the past decade there has been considerable experimentation with the design of architecture description languages that can provide a formal basis for description and analysis of the architectures of component-based systems. As thefield has matured there has emerged among the software architecture research community general consensus about many aspects of the foundations for architectural representation and analysis. One result has been the development of a generic architecture description language, called Acme, that can serve as a common representation for software architectures and that permits the integration of diverse collections of in- dependently developed architectural analysis tools. In this paper we describe the Acme language and tools, and our experience in using it to integrate architecture analysis tools and to describe component-based systems.