Typing Component-Based Communication Systems

Building complex component-based software systems, for instance communication systems based on the Click, Coyote, Appia, or Dream frameworks, can lead to subtle assemblage errors. We present a novel type system and type inference algorithm that prevent interconnection and message-handling errors when assembling component-based communication systems. These errors are typically not captured by classical type systems of host programming languages such as Java or ML. We have implemented our approach by extending the architecture description language (ADL) toolset used by the Dream framework, and used it to check Dream-based communication systems.