Superposing connectors

The ability to construct architectural connectors in a sys tematic and controlled way has been argued to promote reuse and incremental development, e.g., as a way of super posing, a la carte, services like security over a given com munication protocol. Towards this goal, we present a notion of high-order connector, i.e., a connector that takes con nectors as parameters, for superposing coordination mech anisms over the interactions that are handled by the con nectors that are passed as actual arguments. The notion is developed over the language COMMUNITY that we have been using for formalising aspects of architectural design, and illustrated with examples inspired by the case study.