Meta Architecting: Towered a New Generation of Architecture Description Languages

The techniques of meta-modeling and meta-levels have become a mature concept and have been largely used to solve real problems in programming languages, distributed environments, knowledge representation, or data bases. In this article it is shown how the same techniques can be applied in component-based software architecture. It also shown the need to propose mechanisms of reflexivity within the domain of software architecture meta-modeling. The outcome of this is a meta-meta-architecture with a minimal core whose finality is to define meta-components, meta-connectors and meta-architectures. Call this meta-meta-architecture MADL (Meta Architecture Description Language).