Composite Connectors for Composing Software Components

Kung-Kiu Lau, Ling Ling, Vladyslav Ukis and Perla Velasco Elizondo
School of Computer Science, The University of Manchester
Manchester M13 9PL, United Kingdom
{kung-kiu, lling, ukisv, pvelasco}@cs.man.ac.uk

Abstract:

In a component-based system, connectors are used to compose
components. Connectors should have a semantics that makes them 
simple to construct and use. At the same time, their semantics 
should be rich enough to endow them  with desirable properties 
such as genericity, compositionality and reusability. For connector 
construction, compositionality  would be particularly useful, since
it would facilitate systematic construction. In this paper we 
describe a hierarchical approach to connector definition and 
construction that allows connectors to be defined and constructed 
from sub-connectors. These composite connectors are indeed generic,
compositional and reusable. They behave like design patterns, and 
provide powerful composition connectors.