A stateful architecture description language and its supporting development environment

Today mature component-based middleware technologies have been applied to construct complex component-based applications. Those technologies are component-centric, which lack the ability to provide the "big picture" of the system. On the other hand, software architectures are used to control the complexity of component-based software and describe the whole system. To utilize their respective strengths, we propose a stateful Architecture Description Language and a supporting component framework to help designers specify and implement functionally correct (free of deadlock) and type compatible components and connectors. A CASE tool, which is being developed, is also presented in this paper.