A compositional formalization of connector wrappers

  • Authors:
  • Bridget Spitznagel;David Garlan

  • Affiliations:
  • Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA;Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

Increasingly systems are composed of parts: software components, and the interaction mechanisms (connectors) that enable them to communicate. When assembling systems from independently developed and potentially mismatched parts, wrappers may be used to overcome mismatch as well as to remedy extra-functional defciencies.Unfortunately the current practice of wrapper creation and use is ad hoc, resulting in artifacts that are often hard to reuse or compose, and whose impact is diffcult to analyze. What is needed is a more principled basis for creating, understanding, and applying wrappers. Focusing on the class of connector wrappers (wrappers that address issues related to communication and compatibility), we present a means of characterizing connector wrappers as protocol transformations, modularizing them, and reasoning about their properties. Examples are drawn from commonly practiced dependability enhancing techniques.