Industrial software architecture with Gestalt

The architecture of a software system specifies, among other things, its decomposition into parts and the communication between those parts. The structure of this decomposition and interconnection is separable from the protocols (types and sequencing) of communication. A language for specifying this structure and a toolset for checking consistency between structure specifications and code would provide substantial benefits to practicing industrial software architects. Gestalt is an architecture language for specifying structure, with separate, partial support for protocol specifications. The Gestalt toolset checks structural consistency between the architecture and the code. It specifies and checks protocol type compatibility at the interfaces, using the implementation language and tools (e.g. compiler). It provides annotation support for sequencing and other architectural information.