Fractal ADL

Overview

Fractal ADL is the base architecture description language of the Fractal component model. It provides a XML DTD for describing (for instance) component types, component implementations, component hierarchies and component bindings. The DTD can be extended to integrate other architectural concerns, being them defined in the ADL itself or externally, eventually in heterogeneus formats (DSL, IDL, ..).

Fractal ADL is also the name of the extensible and modular toolchain framework for supporting reading the heterogenous architecture description mentioned above. Using or extending the framework you can then assembly a toolchain suitable for your needs: behavioral analysis, code generation, deployment, etc.. taking account eventually different features and for different programming languages. To accomplish that, new XML tags or attributes can be added to the Fractal ADL DTD grammar description, and the ADL processing toolchain can be extended to treat them. The Fractal ADL Toolchain framework is written in Java (it is itself a Fractal application) and its extendibility is obtained by designing its core functionalities using fine-grained components that implement flexible patterns.

Resources

• The Fractal ADL Tutorial : introduces the generic concepts of the XML-based Fractal Architecture Description Language
• The Fractal ADL Toolchain: explains the architecture of the toolchain which processes the ADL (updated documentation is in progress)

Publications

• M. Leclercq, A.-E. Ozcan V. Quéma, and J.-B. Stefani. Supporting Heterogeneus Architecture Descriptions in an Extensible Toolset . 29th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2007), Minneapolis, MN, USA, May 2007. [PDF]