The ArchStudio project under development in the Department of Information and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine has created xADL as for its "enabling architecture-centric tool integration with XML." ArchStudio 2.0 is "an extensible, integrated software architecture development environment that uses an XML-based representation for the underlying architecture. It brings together several UCI developed systems for architecture-based development, including Argo/C2, ArchShell, and DRADEL. The basis for integration in ArchStudio 2.0 is an XML-based abstract model of the system architecture (ArchADT). In the view of the design team, architectures are best represented as hypertext rather than as monolithic specification files. This requires decoupling the description of separable components across hypertext links; and integrating such information with existing hypermedia formats -- both facilities unique to XML. Software designers also benefit from the wide variety of existing tools for visualizing and manipulating XML models. The team has defined an XML DTD called xADL for representing architectural models that can support a wide range of architecture description languages (ADLs). A language, xC2, adds further tags, attributes, and semantics appropriate for representing C2-style architectures. This factoring holds promise for mapping other ADLs on to the basic xADL core."

[March 23, 2001] "xADL: Enabling Architecture-Centric Tool Integration With XML." By Rohit Khare, Michael Guntersdorfer, Nenad Medvidovic, Peyman Oreizy, and Richard N. Taylor. In Proceedings of the 34th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-34), edited by R. H. Sprague. Los Alamitos, CA, USA: IEEE Computer Society. With 29 references. Meeting: January 3-6, 2001. Maui, Hawaii. "In order to support architecture-centric tool integration within the ArchStudio 2.0 Integrated Development Environment (IDE), we adopted Extensible Markup Language (XML) to represent the shared architecture-in-progress. Since ArchStudio is an architectural style-based development environment that incorporates an extensive number of tools, including commercial off-the-shelf products, we developed a new, vendor-neutral, ADL-neutral interchange format called Extensible Architecture description Language (xADL), as well as a "vocabulary" specific to the C2 style (xC2). This paper outlines our vision for representing architectures as hypertext, the design rationale behind xADL and xC2, and summarizes our engineering experience with this strategy." [cache]