Introduction to ArchStudio

ArchStudio is a software and systems architecture development environment.

Click here to watch a Video Tutorial showing an introduction to ArchStudio.

While most development environments, like Microsoft Visual Studio and Borland JBuilder are code-driven development environments, ArchStudio focuses on software development from the perspective of software and systems architecture.

We define architecture as the set of principal design decisions about a system. This is an intentionally broad definition. Every project in every domain will have different needs and quality goals. This means that every project will have a somewhat different set of design decisions that are considered principal by its stakeholders.

The ArchStudio environment plays two roles in the development of architectures:

First, ArchStudio is an architecture development environment. That is, the ArchStudio developers have identified recurring principal design concerns that occur in many domains and projects, and attempted to support these. ArchStudio has built-in support for modeling the hierarchical structure of complex systems, the types of various components, connectors, and interfaces, product-lines of systems that are related by a common base, and so on.

Second, ArchStudio is an architecture meta-modeling environment. ArchStudio is based on the highly-extensible xADL architecture description language. xADL allows stakeholders to define and re-define the language's syntax and semantics to suit their own needs, and ArchStudio provides the tool support for this extensibility. If current modeling tools and notations are not sufficient to capture a particular concern for a particular project, ArchStudio and xADL can be extended to effectively provide support for that concern without having to "re-invent the wheel." As such, ArchStudio provides an ideal platform for domain experts and architecture researchers who want to investigate new ways of modeling architectural concepts without investing an inordinate amount of time in infrastructure development.

ArchStudio Capabilities

Architecture Modeling: ArchStudio creates and manipulates architecture descriptions expressed in the xADL architecture description language (ADL). xADL is the first modularly-extensible architecture description language. Rather than having its syntax and semantics defined monolithically, in one huge chunk, xADL breaks up modeling features into modules using standard XML schemas. ArchStudio's integrated set of tools operates on xADL documents much the same way as a word processor operates on text documents. One major difference, however, is that ArchStudio tools integrate "live"—meaning that a change in any tool is reflected in all others immediately. As noted above, the xADL language can be extended by end-users through the addition of new XML schemas to support domain- or project-specific concerns and modeling needs. New modules are even added to the core xADL language from time to time as they are developed and contributed.

Architecture Visualization: The xADL language defines the structure of architecture description data, but it can be depicted and manipulated in many ways. ArchStudio provides several different visualizations for xADL models. Archipelago, ArchStudio's graphical editor, provides visualizations as symbol graphs - the kind of box-and-arrow models common in tools like Microsoft Visio and OmniGraffle. However, unlike PowerPoint or OmniGraffle models, the graphical depictions in Archipelago aren't just pictures - they are a user-editable graphical projection of the underlying architecture model. ArchStudio includes other editors as well, including ArchEdit, a syntax-directed editors that adapts to new xADL schemas automatically with no recoding, and the Type Wrangler, which provides a custom view of an architectural model that makes it easier to achieve type consistency.

Architecture Analysis: ArchStudio supports exploratory design in all its editors - architectures are rarely perfect until the latest stages of development. However, it is useful to be able to assess the correctness and consistency of an architecture description. The Archlight framework provides a way to automatically test architecture descriptions against many different criteria. Errors can be displayed and inspected, and users can navigate to the site of a problem in any editor with a few mouse clicks. In keeping with ArchStudio's extensible nature, all tests are provided by Archlight plug-ins, and users can add their own tests (and even entirely new analysis engines) through Archlight's plug-in API. Archlight ships with the powerful Schematron XML constraint engine, adapted to integrate seamlessly into the Archlight user interface. Schematron allows complex architectural tests to be specified in about a dozen lines of code.

ArchStudio Development Philosophy

A critical aspect of ArchStudio's ongoing development is that we use ArchStudio to develop ArchStudio - we adopt our own architecture-centric development approach in its development. ArchStudio's architecture is specified in a xADL file, and this xADL file is part of the ArchStudio implementation. Whenever ArchStudio starts up on a machine, its architecture description is being parsed, and the information in that description is used to instantiate and connect the components and connectors in the architecture.

ArchStudio Development

ArchStudio is implemented in Java 2™ Standard Edition (J2SE) version 5.0, also known as Java 1.5. It is implemented as a set of Eclipse plug-ins. It should run on any platform that supports Eclipse, including Windows 2000 or better, MacOS X, and Linux/UNIX.

Although ArchStudio is a research project, its developers have undertaken extensive efforts to mature and productize it. Its previous release, ArchStudio, was a standalone Java application, and sustained more than 70 releases over five years. The mature ArchStudio codebase is at the core of ArchStudio, but ArchStudio includes a number of exciting new features, including significant user-interface and performance enhancements.

Where to Now?

ArchStudio is an open-source project and is free to download and use. We encourage you to download and install ArchStudio and experiment with it.

Contact Us

If you have questions not answered by this website, please feel free to contact the software architectures group at UC Irvine through the ArchStudio developer's (mailman protected) email list at: archstudio-dev [@] uci [.] edu. (Note: You must subscribe to the mail list before you can post to it.)