A Compositional Approach for Constructing Connectors

Bridget Spitznagel, and David Garlan

The Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture (WICSA'01), Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Amsterdam , The Netherlands, August 28-31, 2001, .

Online links: Postscript PDF

Abstract

Increasingly, systems are composed from independently developed parts, and mechanisms that allow those parts to interact (connectors). In many situations, specialized forms of interaction are needed to bridge component mismatches or to achieve extra-functional properties (e.g., security, performance, reliability), making the design and implementation of these interaction mechanisms a critical issue. Unfortunately, system developers have few options: they must live with available, but often inadequate, generic support for interaction (such as RPC), or they must handcraft specialized mechanisms at great cost. In this paper we describe a partial solution to this problem, whereby interaction mechanisms are constructed compositionally. Specifically, we describe a set of operators that can transform generic communication mechanisms (such as RPC and publish-subscribe) to incrementally add new capabilities. We show how these transformations can be used to realize complex interactions (such as Kerberized RPC) and to generate implementations of the new connector types at relatively low cost.

Keywords

For further information, please visit the home pages of the ABLE research project and Carnegie Mellon University's Composable Systems Group.

Last modified: 10/15/2001. For comments and problems, contact able-help@cs.cmu.edu.