Software Language Engineering of Architectural Viewpoints

A common practice in software architecture design is to apply architectural views to design software architecture for the various stakeholder concerns. Architectural views are usually developed based on architectural viewpoints which define the conventions for constructing, interpreting and analyzing views. So far most architectural viewpoints seem to have been primarily used either to support the communication among stakeholders, or at the best to provide a blueprint for the detailed design. In this paper we provide a software language engineering approach to define viewpoints as domain specific languages. This enhances the formal precision of architectural viewpoints and leads to executable views that can be interpreted and analyzed by tools. We illustrate our approach for defining domain specific languages for the viewpoints of the Views and Beyond approach.