Software Connectors: A Taxonomy Approach

Software systems of today are frequently composed from prefabricated, heterogeneous components that provide complex functionality and engage in complex interactions. Current approaches to address the problem of consistently engineering large, complex software systems. are centered around composing software systems from coarse-grained components. Componentbased development mostly focuses on component structure, interfaces, and functionality. An important aspect, particularly magnified by the emergence of the Internet and the growing need for distribution, is interaction among components. Component interaction is embodied in the notion of software connectors. Connectors manifest themselves in a software system as shared variable accesses, table entries, buffers, instructions to a linker, procedure calls, networking protocols, pipes, SQL links between a database and an application, and so forth [9]. In large, and especially distributed systems, connectors become key determinants of system properties, such as performance, resource utilization, global rates of flow, scalability, reliability, security, evolvability, and so forth.