Many architecture description languages (ADLs) have been proposed to model, analyze, configure, and deploy complex software systems. To face this diversity, extensible ADLs (or ADL interchange formats) have been proposed. These ADLs provide linguistic support for integrating various architectural aspects within the same description. Nevertheless, they do not support extensibility at the tool level, i.e. they do not provide an extensible toolset for processing ADL descriptions. In this paper, we present an extensible toolset for easing the development of architecture-based software systems. This toolset is not bound to a specific ADL, but rather uses a grammar description mechanism to accept various input languages, e.g. ADLs, interface definition languages (IDLs), domain specific languages (DSLs). Moreover, it can easily be extended to implement many different features, such as behavioral analysis, code generation, deployment, etc. Its extensibility is obtained by designing its core functionalities using fine-grained components that implement flexible design patterns. Experiments are presented to illustrate both the functionalities implemented by the toolset and the way it can be extended.

Abstract This paper presents FRACTAL, a hierarchical and reflective component model with sharing. Components in this model can be endowed with arbitrary reflective capabilities, from plain black‐box objects to components that allow a fine‐grained manipulation of their internal structure. The paper describes JULIA, a Java implementation of the model, a small but efficient runtime framework, which relies on a combination of interceptors and mixins for the programming of reflective features of components. The paper presents a qualitative and quantitative evaluation of this implementation, showing that component‐based programming in FRACTAL can be made very efficient. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.