Software Connectors and Their Role in Component Deployment

Abstract To support rapid software evolution, it is desirable to construct software systems from reusable components. In this approach, the architecture of a system is described as a collection of components along with the interactions among these components. Whereas the main system functional blocks are components, the properties of the system also strongly depend on the character of the component interactions. This fact gave birth to the “connector ” concept which is an abstraction capturing the nature of these interactions. The problem tackled in this paper is that even though the notion of connectors originates in the earliest papers on software architectures [20, 15], connectors are currently far from being a typical first class entity in the contemporary component-based systems. By articulating the “deployment anomaly”, the paper identifies the role connectors should play when the distribution and deployment of a component-based application is considered. Further, we introduce a connector model reflected at all the key stages of an application’s development: ADL specification, deployment, and implementatio