Alfa: xAlfa

An Assembly Language for Software Architecture

xAlfa is the name of the notation used for creating composition models of Alfa's primitives. This notation is created as a visual language that is employed in the visual modeling tool for Alfa called ViSAC. Moreover, xAlfa itself is defined as a meta model for GME. It certainly can be defined consistently with UML 2.0. If you are interested in mapping the GME meta model of xAlfa to UML 2.0, please contact us.

xAlfa models created in ViSAC can be currently accessed using Java. An API for xAlfa supports access to styles and architectures created using ViSAC. xAlfa data structures are created by alfaac, a compiler and analyzer for Alfa, from xAlfa models. xAlfa models can be obtained from ViSAC as well as from xAlfa serialized pickle files.

JavaDoc for xAlfa is available, so is the class diagram describing the classes and relationships of this API.

Figure 1. Class Diagram of xAlfa pardigm for GME

Figure 2. Class Diagram of xAlfa API

This material is partly based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. CCR-9985441. Effort also sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Rome Laboratory, Air Force Materiel Command, USAF under agreement numbers F30602-99-C-0174 and F30602-00-2-0615. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Governmental purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation thereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Rome Laboratory or the U.S. Government. Effort also sponsored in part by the U.S. Army Tank Automotive and Armaments Command, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Xerox Corporation.