ByADL Homepage


Welcome to the byADL Website,
the acronim byADL stays for Build Your ADL. ByADL is a framework for developing next generation ADLs according to their evolved requirements. byADL is built on model-driven technologies and tools which are more powerful with respect to techniques used in the past, such as normal programming languages or XSLT that may suffer from code maintainability and scalability issues.

In byADL, the specification of an ADL mainly consists of a metamodel whose semantics is given in terms of the DUALLy semantic core. In particular, byADL is fully integrated and built on top of DUALLy, a framework that provides ADLs and tools interoperability. Moreover, byADL provides composition mechanisms enabling a software architect to create their own ADL by customizing or extending existent ADLs. In byADL interoperability and extensibility mechanisms coexist since we believe that it is not practical to put everything in one architectural language. For this reason we do not promote, even though this could be technically possible, the composition and merging of two different ADLs.

With byADL, an existing ADL can be extended with

  1. domain specific concerns
  2. analysis notations
  3. new architectural views
  4. methodologies and processes that support other life-cycle activities

byADL allows software architects to cut-off part of an ADL metamodel and to finely tune it by adding references and so on. ADL-specific tools are build on top of byADL that enables functionalities like visualization, consistency checking, and multi-view handling of architectural descriptions. byADL is implemented as a set of Eclipse plugins that can be integrated with other MDE technologies already available in the Eclipse community.



News

05.07.2012

The phD Thesis of Ivano Malavolta is available here. The thesis is titled "Software Architecture by Reuse, Composition and Customization".

30 September 2010

A second version of the byADL prototype is available in the Downloads section of this website. It was presented during the Demo track of the European Conference on Software Architecture (ECSA) 2010.

15 June 2010

Accepted paper at the tool demo track of the ECSA 2010 conference. The paper is titled "ByADL: an MDE framework for building extensible Architecture Description Languages" and will be presented during the ECSA 2010 international conference.

25 March 2010

The ByADL section of this web-site has been created. It provides byADL background, concepts, and tool.

24 March 2010

Accepted paper at the ACM Student Research Competition. The paper is titled "Providing support for creating next generation software architecture languages" and will be presented during the ICSE 2010 international conference.

12 January 2010

Accepted paper at ICSE 2010. The paper is titled "Developing next generation adls through mde techniques." and will be presented at International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2010), Cape Town - South Africa.

27 September 2009

The first prototype of the byADL framework is available in the Downloads section of this website. Please read the readme file clarifying the assumptions we made and the limitations of the current version of the byADL implementation.

9 September 2009

The departmental homepage of ByADL (this Website) is online.