Architectural styles can be defined with families of architectural specifications obtained from generalizations of specific architectural descriptions. Therefore, the general approach to describe an architectural style is based on the imposition of pre-established rules to architectural descriptions following a vocabulary and the restrictions defined to the style. This way, the development of a new style requires de description of an architecture which follows the style. In this paper we propose an innovative approach for the description of architectural styles. We argue that architectural styles can be described more easily when considering a hierarchical approach, where the definition of new styles is based on the description of existing ones. In order to validate our approach we present the language Xtyle, which is an application of XML to the specification of distributed architectural styles using the concept of multiple inheritance. In addition, we present a taxonomy of distributed architectural styles based on reuse of specifications. |