xADL: enabling architecture-centric tool integration with XML

In order to support architecture-centric tool integration within the ArchStudio 2.0 Integrated Development Environment (IDE), we adopted Extensible Markup Language (XML) to represent the shared architecture-in-progress. Since ArchStudio is an architectural style-based development environment that incorporates an extensive number of tools, including commercial off-the-shelf products, we developed a new, vendor-neutral, ADL-neutral interchange format called Extensible Architecture description Language (xADL), as well as a "vocabulary" specific to the C2 style (xC2). This paper outlines our vision for representing architectures as hypertext, the design rationale behind xADL and xC2, and summarizes our engineering experience with this strategy.