Towards a taxonomy of software connectors

Abstract

Software systems of today are frequently composed from prefabricated, heterogeneous components that provide complex functionality and engage in complex interactions. Existing research on component-based development has mostly focused on component structure, interfaces, and functionality. Recently, software architecture has emerged as an area that also places significant importance on component interactions, embodied in the notion of software connectors. However, the current level of understanding and support for connectors has been insufficient. This has resulted in their inconsistent treatment and a notable lack of understanding of what the fundamental building blocks of software interaction are and how they can be composed into more complex interactions. This paper attempts to address this problem. It presents a comprehensive classification framework and taxonomy of software connectors. The taxonomy is obtained through an extensive analysis of existing component interactions. The taxonomy is used both to understand existing software connectors and to suggest new, unprecedented connectors. We demonstrate the use of the taxonomy on the architecture of a large, existing system.

Xcd – Modular, Realizable Software Architectures

“…Work which has been done at identifying different types of connectors [16,27] has tended to focus at cataloguing and specifying basic interaction mechanisms, e.g., procedure calls, event buses, etc., especially since these were needed to base upon them more complex connectors. However, the use of basic interaction mechanisms as connectors in an architectural specification makes it difficult to understand what the real protocols in the system are and leads to system specifications that are at a very low level of abstraction, as is the case with AADL [11].…”

“…Indeed, designers are forced to incorporate the behaviour of the more complex connectors they wish to use into their components, decreasing their re-use potential and increasing the chance of architectural mismatch [14]. In fact, the presence of low-level connectors [16,27] in a system architecture should alert designers that they have a potential problem. That is, they have over-designed the architectural description and/or have failed to describe the general protocols that are supposed to be used among their components in a way that is sufficiently abstract, and therefore understandable and analyzable.…”

Automatic Control Flow Generation from Software Architectures

“…In traditional ADLs, components are supposed to represent computation, and connectors interaction between components [13] ( Fig. 2 (a)).…”

A graph based architectural (Re)configuration language

“…An interconnection between two components is described by a design that just declares the common variables and actions of the components, without introducing any additional behaviour, thus corresponding to the recently proposed notion of duct [21]. This semantics has been presented previously [17,16] and it is trivial to translate configurations into categorical diagrams.…”