Lopes, Antónia; Wermelinger, Michel and Fiadeiro, José Luiz (2003). Higher-Order Architectural Connectors. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 12(1), pp. 64–104.
Abstract
We develop a notion of higher-order connector towards supporting the systematic construction of architectural connectors for software design. A higher-order connector takes connectors as parameters and allows for services such as security protocols and fault-tolerance mechanisms to be superposed over the interactions that are handled by the connectors passed as actual arguments. The notion is first illustrated over CommUnity, a parallel program design language that we have been using for formalizing aspects of architectural design. A formal, algebraic semantics is then presented which is independent of any Architectural Description Language. Finally, we discuss how our results can impact software design methods and tools.
