Superposing connectors

The ability to construct architectural connectors in a systematic and controlled way has been argued to promote reuse and incremental development, e.g., as a way of superposing, a la carte, services like security, over a given communication protocol. Towards this goal, we present a notion of high-order connector, i.e., a connector that takes connectors as parameters, for superposing coordination mechanisms over the interactions that are handled by the connectors that are passed as actual arguments. The notion is developed over the language COMMUNITY that we have been using for formalising aspects of architectural design, and illustrated with examples inspired by the case study.