Generating Connectors for Homogenous and Heterogenous Deployment

Abstract

Software connectors are typically used in component-based engineering to model and realize component interconnections. Connectors play an important role both at design time, when they allow for specifying the way components interact, and at runtime, when they actually implement the specified interactions in particular target environments. Connectors also help with deployment (both homogeneous and heterogeneous) by allowing for seamless distribution and overcoming incompatibilities between components and component systems by utilizing adaptors. An important aspect of employing connectors is the amount of work connected with their use. In this context, to make connectors truly an asset, it is necessary to allow for generating their runtime implementations based on design-time specification. This is however a problem (mainly because of the semantic gap between the connector specification and its implementation), which has not been sufficiently addressed so far, especially when trying to use connectors in the context of heterogeneous deployment. In this thesis, we propose a technique of automatic generation of a connector implementation based on a high-level connector specification. The thesis focuses on building connectors in the scope of homogeneous and heterogeneous deployment, which means that the generated...