Implementing Software Connectors through First-Class Methods

Recently, a vast amount of research efforts are made to derive a higher-level abstraction mechanism than the class abstraction in object-oriented languages. Notable examples include the research activities on software architectures and component-based software development. Of these, software architectures allow us to focus on the issue of software connectors , which are used to describe interactions between software components in the context of architectural styles. But, few contemporary programming languages supports the explicit notion of connectors, which makes it difficult to practice software development based on software architectural concepts. In this paper, we present our experience in implementing software connectors through first-class methods in the Java programming language. We view software connectors as methods over methods and show that a suitable set of reflective facilities can be a nice device for implementing software connectors. 1 Introduction Despite the strength..