It is increasingly noticeable, in the current telecommunications market, a trend towards using communication systems that allow rapid and cheap deployment of new services. In pursuit of network architectures that keep up with such trend, significant research has been carried out on programmable networks. This field is set to gain further impetus from developments in network processor-based equipment. In this context, it is crucial that service creation processes be well structured and, as far as possible, systematic. This thesis, which is part of an ongoing project at the TeleMídia Laboratory, PUC-Rio, adopts a service creation approach in which techniques from Software Architecture and Component-Based Software Development are uniformly and ubiquitously applied at all levels of a communication system, ranging from high- level service specifications to low-level software implementation running in network processors. The main aim is to express adaptibility in cross-cutting service aspects and, meanwhile, cut down on the cognitive overhead usually imposed upon designers and programmers due to such multiplicity of concerns. For the sake of the aforementioned aim, an XML-based specification language, called LindaX, has been developed. Such language allows various system aspects to be architecturally described - by means of a single syntactic framework for DSLs - as well as adaptable in a constrained way - through style structures. Complementing the work, a toolset for handling LindaX architecture descriptions has been defined, which allows their refinement to different formal languages or their synthesis onto system configurations and adaptation controlling mechanisms for diverse platforms.