Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences

Software architectures are software system models that represent the design of a system at a high level of abstraction. A software architecture typically focuses on the coarse-grained organization of functionality into components and on the explicit representation and specification of inter-component communication. A notable feature of many architectural models (and the languages used to express them) is their representation of communication concerns in explicit model elements, which are typically called connectors. However, there is little consensus yet in the software engineering community on the role of connectors in an architectural model, or even on the necessity of making them first-class model elements. In this paper we demonstrate the utility of explicit connectors in architectural models through a presentation and analysis of an architecture for a meeting scheduler system. We show how the functional abstraction provided by connectors contributes to the mobility, distribution and extensibility of the design, as well as its ability to sustain run time structural change. Furthermore, we demonstrate how connectors encapsulate important aspects of inter-component communication, including the number and identity of communication recipients, the policy used to select these recipients, the choice of implementation technology for the communications, and architectural constraints on component composition.