3. Architecture description languages

A software architecture description language is used to express, in declarative mode, the configuration of an application in terms of the composition of elementary software units and any deployment constraints on execution environments. Associated with this language are tools for checking the validity of the assembly, for generating the binary code of the distributed application, scripts to automate deployment and system services to support the application deployment, monitoring and reconfiguration process. To illustrate this approach, we will use the work carried out by the SIRAC team around the OLAN architecture description language [8] .