Architecture as Language
Markus Völter · IEEE Software · 2010
Software architecture is an important aspect of software, although developers don't have a good way of expressing it. This leads to architecture being hard to understand, discuss, document, analyze, and implement consistently in large systems or teams. This article explains how and why to use domain-specific languages (DSLs) to describe software architecture. Architects develop a DSL that expresses the desired architecture directly, often in real time during architecture definition; they can then use this DSL to precisely describe systems based on the architecture. Because the DSL is formal and therefore tool processable, analyses can be conducted on the models and code generation can be used to consistently implement the architecture in code.