A Connector Model Suitable for Automatic Generation of Connectors

The notion of connector can be found in many of the contemporary component-based systems. A connector is an architectural element, which embodies communication among components in a system. In this paper we propose a flexible connector model that is easy to use in practice and expressive enough to capture the semantics of component interconnections. Our model follows the top-down approach to software design and allows to define different types of connections (procedure call, messaging, pipe, etc.) and their specialization (adding security, protocol checks, etc.) For this model we propose an abstract connector generator, a framework allowing to create complex component interconnections almost automatically. The paper presents basic ideas of connector generation and specifies the framework data structures and interfaces needed for generation in platform independent language (CORBA IDL [22]). The paper is concluded with discussion on our prototype implementation for SOFA/DCUP component system [30] and describes the cases used for testing of overall functionality of our concept.