Software architecture has become a sensitive discipline, which consists in concretizing the user requirements into a set of artifacts that can be used to model and reason about the software to be developed. However, the architect often relies on its own knowledge to map domain-specific requirements onto generic software abstractions. Most of the time, this leads to the definition of repetitive tasks and architecture fragments, which can be particularly error prone. We therefore believe that architects need a more flexible approach to cope with the definition of domain-specific architectures by leveraging general purpose architecture description languages. This paper introduces the FraSCAla framework as an architectural framework that can be used to rapidly prototype and experiment domain-specific ADLs in order to catalyze the definition and to improve the reliability of software architectures. We demonstrate the merits of this approach on two case studies that illustrate component-based architectures exhibiting various categories of architectural patterns.