The Road Ahead for Architectural Languages

Despite the huge number of architectural languages that have been proposed in the last two decades, evidence today shows that industry-ready, well-accepted, and recognized languages for producing architecture descriptions are still lacking. This article explores the usability requirements of architectural languages from the perspectives of language definition, language mechanisms, and tool support. With a better understanding of architectural-language requirements, the authors explore the use of model-driven engineering to realize next-generation architectural languages, as well as its limitations.