I've looked at Wright and Acme that are linked from that page. I came away with the conclusion that you need to use a formal language to describe relationships between the entities in your system. The language should be flexible enough to define new entities, and new kinds of relationships. All of that points to the need for an API/library to describe software architectures, probably using parameterized types in Scala/Java or relying on features in more dynamic languages like Ruby. The language need not be Turing complete, though.
An added benefit of using a formal language is that you can verify whether the invariants of the system are maintained when you make changes. For example: If you try to connect two components which support different protocols, the program won't validate.
Generating diagrams with suitable layouts from this description is a separate problem. Perhaps something from the field of graph drawing could help? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_drawing
I've looked at Wright and Acme that are linked from that page. I came away with the conclusion that you need to use a formal language to describe relationships between the entities in your system. The language should be flexible enough to define new entities, and new kinds of relationships. All of that points to the need for an API/library to describe software architectures, probably using parameterized types in Scala/Java or relying on features in more dynamic languages like Ruby. The language need not be Turing complete, though.
An added benefit of using a formal language is that you can verify whether the invariants of the system are maintained when you make changes. For example: If you try to connect two components which support different protocols, the program won't validate.
These ideas may also have overlap with software specification languages - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specification_language . I didn't dig too much into that aspect.
Generating diagrams with suitable layouts from this description is a separate problem. Perhaps something from the field of graph drawing could help? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_drawing