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European Software Engineering Conference

ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering

ESEC 1997, SIGSOFT FSE 1997: Software Engineering — ESEC/FSE'97 pp 483–499Cite as

Executable connectors: Towards reusable design elements

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1301))

Abstract

The decomposition of a software application into components and connectors at the design stage has been promoted as a way to describe and reason about complex software architectures. There is, however, surprisingly little language support for this decomposition at implementation level. Interaction relationships which are identified at design time are lost as they get spread out into the participating entities at implementation. In this paper, we propose first-class connectors in an object-oriented language as a first step towards making software architecture more explicit at implementation level. Our connectors are run-time entities which control the interaction of components and can express a rich repertoire of interaction relationships. We show how connectors can be reused and how they enhance the reuse of components.

This research is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation, grant MHV 21-41671.94 (to T.R.) and project grant 2000-46947.96

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Software Composition Group, Institut für Informatik (IAM), Universität Bern, Germany

    Stéphane Ducasse & Tamar Richner

Authors
  1. Stéphane Ducasse
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  2. Tamar Richner
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Mehdi Jazayeri Helmut Schauer

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© 1997 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Ducasse, S., Richner, T. (1997). Executable connectors: Towards reusable design elements. In: Jazayeri, M., Schauer, H. (eds) Software Engineering — ESEC/FSE'97. ESEC SIGSOFT FSE 1997 1997. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1301. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-63531-9_32

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-63531-9_32

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-63531-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-69592-9

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