Using DSL for Automatic Generation of Software Connectors

Component-based engineering is a recognized paradigm, which models an application as a collection of reusable components. The key idea behind components is that they contain only the business logic and communicate with one another only via well-defined interfaces. The communication paths among components (so called bindings) are in modern component systems realized by software connectors, which allow explicit modeling of communication and also its implementation at runtime. An important aspect of using connectors is the possibility of their automatic generation, which saves a significant amount of development work. However, the generation itself is not a trivial task, since there is a big semantic gap between the abstract specification of a connector at design time and its implementation at runtime. In this paper, we present an approach to generating implementations of software connectors. The approach is based on a new domain specific language for describing templates of connector implementations and a transformation framework using the Strate-go/XT term rewriting system for generating source code of connectors.