Composing Connectors of Elements

Connectors are used in component-based systems as first-class entities to abstract component interactions. To explain their responsibilities, several taxonomies have been published to date. However, most of them mix different levels of abstraction and fail to provide any guidelines that address different component interconnections through “real connectors” (employed in assembling real-life applications). In this paper, we propose a way to compose connectors by using fine-grained elements, each of them representing only a single, well-defined functionality. We identify an experimentally proven set of connector elements, which, composed together, model four basic component interconnection types (procedure call, messaging, streaming, blackboard), and allow for connector variants as well (to reflect distribution, security, fault-tolerance, etc.). The presented results are based on a proof-of-the-concept implementation where connectors are automatically generated (assuming description of connector structure and middleware technologies are provided). Thanks to the element composition approach, such connectors can support more middleware technologies at the same time.