Connectors for Mobile Programs

Software Architecture has put forward the concept of connector to express complex relationships between system components, thus facilitating the separation of coordination from computation. This separation is especially important in mobile computing due to the dynamic nature of the interactions among participating processes. In this paper, we present connector patterns, inspired in Mobile UNITY, that describe three basic kinds of transient interactions: action inhibition, action synchronization, and message passing. The connectors are given in COMMUNITY, a UNITY-like program design language which has a semantics in Category Theory. We show how the categorical framework can be used for applying the proposed connectors to specific components and how the resulting architecture can be visualized by a diagram showing the components and the connectors.