1 Language Support for Component Communication in LayOM

Language Support for Component Communication in LayOMJan BoschUniversity of Karlskrona/RonnebyDepartment of Computer Science and Business AdministrationS-372 25 Ronneby, Swedene-mail: Jan.Bosch@ide.hk-r.sewww: http://www.pt.hk-r.se/~boschAbstractComponents, as well as objects, need to be composed in order to achieve required system functionality. Virtually allcomponents require communication with other components,acquaintances, in the course of their operation.Although the conventional object-oriented model is one of the most appropriate paradigms for component-orientedprogramming, it provides too little support, i.e. based on object names or through pointers, for selecting theacquaintances of an object. This lack of expressiveness reduces the reusability and understandability of an object,since the selection of and communication with acquaintances is implicit in the class specification. In this paper, weanalyse the relevant dimensions of object communication and propose a solution in the context of our extendedobject-oriented model, i.e. the layered object model (LayOM).1 IntroductionThe concept of component-oriented programming almost seems analogous to object-oriented programming. The notion of a component refers to a module that contains both code and data and presents an interface that can be invoked by other components. This description is also valid for defining objects. Thus, objects can be seen as compo-nents that can be used to compose systems with. The naive view of system construction takes the standpoint that a sys-tem can be composed from its components without any further actions to be taken. In practice, it turns out that it never works that way. The composition of components is much more than just connections in terms of linking. Thus, although from an abstract viewpoint the conventional object-oriented paradigm seems highly suited for component-oriented programming, in practice it shows that expressiveness and flexibility is lacking in the traditional object model.When analysing what the conventional object-oriented paradigm is lacking, a number of problems can be identified. One problem is that the flexibility of a class is quite restricted, since it can only be reused through inheritance or by composing an instance of the class in a new class definition. The internal composition of an existing class can gener-ally not be changed. This leads to the situation, that reuse of components, up to a large extent, is as-is reuse and adap-tation of existing components is quite difficult. This type of component reuse we refer to as bottom-up reuse. Complementary to bottom-up reuse there is top-down reuse, i.e. specifications of system architectures that are to be completed with components that are placed in the architectural structure. Object-oriented frameworks encompass both types of reuse since a framework describes an architecture for a particular application domain, but often restricts the range of components that can be composed into the framework to subclasses of the framework classes.A lacking type of component, from our perspective, is in between the two aforementioned types of reuse. Top-down reuse as in object-oriented frameworks tend to take the approach that the framework or architecture is in full control of the (closed) system. Composing the framework as a component with other components in a open and dynamic system often is very difficult since frameworks are based on the hollywood principle (don’t call us, we call you) which assumes that the framework has global control in the system. Bottom-up reuse has as a problem that the functionality of the component cannot be adapted since all the functionality is encapsulated and hard-wired. The intermediate type would be a component that can be configured with different parts and yet dynamically composed with other compo-nents to an open and flexible system.In figure 1 the three different types of composition of components is shown. In figure 1(a), the system is composed of reused atomic building block (ABB) components. The composition of the components, however, is new code. The other extreme is shown in 1(c) where the general system structure is available, but some of the parts have to added as new code. The intermediate approach is shown in 1(b) where a component can both be configured with new or reused subcomponents and be used to configure higher level components.The above description of component-oriented programming is the traditional perspective and, in this view, composi-tion of components is based on some form of type interface. Components have an ‘upward’ interface to indicate thefunctionality the component can offer and a ‘downward’ interface in which the component specifies what functional-ity it requires from lower levels. When using a component in a system, the ‘downward’ interface of the component has to be satisfied by other reused or new components. One of the difficult issues in component-oriented programming is how to specify the dependencies of a component. Although, in general, a type interface approach is taken, this often does not provide sufficient expressiveness or is too restrictive to be satisfactory.Figure 1. three types of componentsWhen relating the discussion above to the use of the object-oriented paradigm for component programming, one can identify that the traditional object-oriented paradigm does not provide sufficient support for specifying the dependen-cies of a class or object on its, what we call, acquaintances, i.e. external objects that the object uses in the course of its operation. In the traditional OO model, an acquaintance is bound at compile or link time through name binding or, during run-time, by means of pointer passing. As we will discuss later in this paper, the name-based binding is not suf-ficient flexible in dynamic, component-based systems. In fact, it often even is too restrictive in traditional applica-tions, which resulted in the definition of object pointers. The use of pointers requires the software engineer to explicitly program the way the object selects its acquaintances. Next to the amount of additionally required coding, the lack of reusability of the acquaintance selection process and the reduced reusability of the object itself, the pointer mechanism provides no support for treating the objects in the object context as an object set that can be used for selecting the appropriate acquaintances.Also the ‘upward’ interface of the component might, depending on the application, not be sufficiently expressive. As we identified in [Bosch 95b], the static interface of the traditional object-oriented model is problematic since it does not allow the software engineer to define a dynamic interface that is changed depending on the state of the object or the client accessing the object. Especially presenting a tailored interface to the different clients of an object is a highly useful concept for the specification of the ‘upward’ interface of components.As a solution to, among others, lack of expressiveness in the conventional object-oriented model for specifying the ‘upward’ interface of an object, we defined the layered object model (LayOM), an extended object model that extends the conventional object model with novel expressiveness to deal with, for example, inter-object relations [Bosch 95b], abstract object state [Bosch 95c] and representation of design patterns [Bosch 96a]. Part of the current work on the layered object model is concerned with providing language support for the specification of the ‘downward’ interface of an object. In this paper, we report on some of our results in specifying the ‘downward’ interface within LayOM. Since this paper is concerned with expressiveness for the ‘downward’ interface of objects, the next section addresses the problems related with the selection of acquaintances by an object. In section 3, the expressiveness that we consider necessary and relevant for acquaintance selection is defined. Our solution in the context of the layered object model is presented in section 4. Section 5 briefly discusses some related work and the last section contains the conclusions.2 Problem StatementThe traditional object-oriented model only supports communication between a sender object and a known receiver object, i.e. the sender has to know the identity of the receiver object before sending a message to it. As described in the introduction, additional mechanisms for communication are required in component-based systems where the acquaintances of an object need to be selected dynamically and, preferably, without involving the software engineer. We have observed object communication in both single object. When no advanced communication constructs are available in a language model for component specification, a number of problems can be identified related to:•Object reusability: If the software engineer has to specify explicitly in the class code how to select and address acquaintance objects, the reusability of the class is decreased because it cannot be reused in situations where the way acquaintance objects are selected and addressed is different, even though the functionality of the class might be applicable to the application.•Understandability: If a method, in addition of a simple message send, contains a code section for selection of the appropriate object or objects to send the message to, the actual functionality is obscured and understandability is decreased.•Lack of expressiveness: In large and distributed component-based systems, the mechanisms for object communi-cation available in the conventional object-oriented paradigm are too restricted in their expressiveness. This leads to reusability problems related to, among others, the object selection and multi-cast mechanisms.•Selection mechanism reusability: Property-based selection requires a selection algorithm or mechanism. If this algorithm is part of the code of the class, the algorithm is inherently not reusable. In order to be reusable, the selec-tion algorithm needs to be specified separate from the object that uses it.3 Dimensions of Object CommunicationThe communication between objects is, in the traditional object-oriented paradigm, based on direct communication between a sender and a receiver object, where the sender knows the identity of the receiver. As we discussed in sec-tion 2, this type of object communication is insufficient for communication in open component-based systems. In this section, four dimensions of object communication are described that play a role in the communication between two objects. These dimensions are the time and duration of binding a receiver(s), the condition based on which a particular binding is selected, the number of receivers and the size of the region in which the receiver is searched. In the follow-ing sections, these different orthogonal aspects of object communication are described in more detail.3.1 Type and DurationVirtually any object has one or more acquaintances, i.e. objects it communicates with in the course of its operation. The methods of the object call acquaintances through message sends of the form acq1.method(args);. However, the method is generally specified in a class and the designer of the class cannot decide the object to be used for communi-cation. In traditional object-oriented systems, the selection of the actual object to communicate with is either based on compile-time or run-time binding based on the object name or by references passed to the object. As discussed in sec-tion 2, this leads to several problems because the traditional binding approach is too rigid for objects in complex, dynamic systems. The use of references solves the problem of rigidity, but has as a disadvantage that the software engineer has to program the object communication on top of the object model which is tedious, error-prone and lacks reusability.When studying the object binding in complex, distributed systems, we have found three of types of object binding. Below, we describe each type in more detail.•Permanent binding: Permanent binding is, as the name implies, the situation where an acquaintance of an object is bound either at instantiation time of the object or when the first call to the acquaintance is issued. The binding to that acquaintance object is kept throughout the lifetime of the object. This type of binding seems similar to the tra-ditional binding process, but it actually is a generalisation. In section 3.2 the conditions for selecting acquaintances are described. These conditions can include an object name but also various other features of an object.•Per call binding: Since the objects in the context of an object may change dynamically, at different times, differ-ent objects may be the most appropriate acquaintance to deliver a service to the object. As an example, while trav-elling by car one needs a gas station from time to time. However, it would be very inconvenient to be bound to one unique gas station. One wants to select a gas station in one immediate vicinity for this purpose. This is a typical example of a call-based binding.•Per transaction binding: The above two binding types actually are two ends of a spectrum of binding approaches.Transaction binding binds the object to a particular acquaintance object for the duration of a logical unit of interac-tion. The interaction may consist of multiple message sends and last for a considerable amount of time, but the complex of messages forms a logical entity.3.2 Conditions for BindingIn the previous section, object binding was discussed, but not the way objects are selected to fulfil an acquaintance role. In traditional object-oriented systems, this is done based on matching the name of the object or by passing refer-ences. When passing references, the object has already been selected, so no further selection is required. However, the use of object references actually indicates that the name-based selection mechanism did not fit the requirements of the software engineer and therefore it was necessary to implement the selection mechanism on top of the language model, i.e. the selection of the acquaintance had to be hand-coded.Object binding mechanisms can be categorised in several ways, but for the discussion in this paper we use the follow-ing classification:•Name-based binding: The acquaintance is selected based on the name of the object. Although this approach may seem similar to conventional name-based binding, it actually is a generalisation. For example, when name-based binding is combined with per-call binding, the selected object may be different for every subsequent call to the acquaintance due to changes in the context of the calling object.•Class-based binding: The object fulfilling the role of the acquaintance can also be selected based on the required class of the acquaintance. When binding the acquaintance, the selected object is located in the context of the object and is of the appropriate class. Combined name and class-based binding is used in strongly typed object-oriented languages such as C++.•Property-based binding: When binding based on name and/or class is not sufficient, the condition for binding can be defined as a property that an aspirant acquaintance object has to fulfil in order to be selected as an acquaint-ance. The property might be an arbitrary expression define the discriminating characteristic of the appropriate object. Since both the name as well as the class of the object are a property of an object, the former two binding approaches can be viewed as specialisations of property-based binding.3.3 Number of Selected ObjectsThe acquaintances of an object need to be selected in the context of the object, for instance, by use of a broadcast mechanism. However, the result of the selection process might be that the set of appropriate objects consists of more than one object. Multiple objects in the context of the object are possible acquaintances. Traditionally, an object always sends a message to only a single receiver object. However, it might be the intention of the message send to address more than a single object. In any case, the appropriate number of objects representing an acquaintance needs to be specified. In the layered object model, three different types of object selection are used.•Single object: Although the object selection process may result in multiple potential acquaintance objects, only one of these objects is selected for delivering the required service. Although one could imagine different approaches to select the acquaintance from the set of suitable objects, just selecting the first object is the simplest solution and does not result in any loss of generality. An example situation could simply be getting a cup of coffee.Although at a computer science department, in general, multiple coffee machines are available, the simplest solu-tion is to select the closest one.•All objects: The other extreme in the object selection process is to bind all suitable objects to the acquaintance and to multi-cast messages to the acquaintance to all these objects. A typical example is an emergency stop in a system that has to be broadcasted to all objects selected during the selection process.•N objects: The compromising option is of course to select a subset of the potential acquaintance objects, i.e. to select N objects.3.4 Selection Region for BindingThe fourth dimension that plays a role in object communication is the region in which objects are searched for the object selection process. In large, distributed systems, the cost of a broadcast to all objects in the system often is incredibly high and the function cannot be used except for exceptional situations. Therefore, if an object wants to con-nect to its acquaintances, the region in which the potential acquaintances are searched has to be restricted. On the other hand, the object itself may require some acquaintance to be available locally.•Inside object: The object can use its part objects as a selection set for dynamically linking an acquaintance. In this case, the object can, very flexibly, link one or more of its parts as an acquaintance object without having to distin-guish between binding internal or external objects.•Immediate context: As described in section 3, we assume a hierarchical object model, meaning that all objects (except the system itself) are encapsulated by another object E. A very logical region for selection then is the immediate context of the object consisting of all objects encapsulated by E.•N encapsulating contexts: The selection region can be extended to more than only the immediate context. This option indicates that the region for selection is enlarged to N encapsulating contexts. For example, in the case that N=2, the context would consist of all objects in the same context and all objects in the immediate context of the encapsulating object. This option is related to the issues discussed in section 4.3. For instance, in case of a select-ing a single object, the search may begin in the immediate context of the object and subsequently continue until a suitable acquaintance is found or the maximum of N encapsulating contexts is reached.•Global: The final option,global, uses the complete system as the selection region, i.e. starting from the immediate context of the object the search for suitable acquaintance objects is performed until sufficient suitable candidates have been found. Since the search starts in the immediate context of the object, the global search is not the same asa system-wide broadcast and is commonly used when selecting a single or a smaller number of acquaintanceobjects.4 Layered Object ModelAs an example of the use of the techniques and tools for language extensibility, we introduce our research language, the layered object model(LayOM) in section 4.1. Our approach to acquaintance selection and communication is described in section 4.2.4.1 Layered Object ModelThe layered object model is an extensible object model. A LayOM object contains, next to the traditional object model components as class, method and instance variable, a number of additional components such as layers,states and cat-egories. In figure 2, an example LayOM object is presented. The layers encapsulate the object, so that messages send to or by the object have to pass the layers. Each layer, when it intercepts a message, converts the message into a pas-sive message object and evaluates the contents to determine the appropriate course of action. Layers can be used for various types of functionality. Layer classes have, among others, been defined for the representation of relations between objects [Bosch 95b] and for representing design patterns [Bosch 96a]. The subject of this paper is the use of layers for representing acquaintance selection and communication.A state in LayOM is an abstraction of the internal state of the object. In LayOM, the internal state of an object is referred to as the concrete state. Based on the object’s concrete state, the software engineer can define an externally visible abstraction of the concrete state, referred to as the abstract state of an object. The abstract object state is gener-ally simpler in both the number of dimensions, as well as in the domains of the state dimensions.A category is an expression that defines a set of objects that are treated similarly by the object. This set of objects treated as equivalent by the object we denote as acquaintances. A category describes the discriminating characteris-tics of a subset of the external objects that should be treated equally by the class. The behavioural layer types use cat-egories to determine whether the sender of a message is a member of an acquaintance category. If the sender is a member, the message is subject to the semantics of the specification of the behavioural layer type instance.A layer, as mentioned, encapsulates the object and intercepts messages. It can perform all kinds of behaviour, either in response to a message or otherwise. Layers have, among others, been used to represent relations between objects. In LayOM, relations have been classified into structural relations, behavioural relations and application-domain relations. Structural relation types define the structure of a class and provide reuse. These relation types can be used to extend the functionality of a class. Inheritance and delegation are examples of structural relation types. The second type of relations are the behavioural relations that are used to relate an object to its clients. The functionality of the class is used by client objects and the class can define a behavioural relation with acquaintances. Behavioural relations restrict the behaviour of the class. For instance, some methods might be restricted to certain acquaintances or in spe-cific situations. The third type of relations are application domain relations. Many domains have, next to reusable application domain classes, also application domain relation types that can be reused. For instance, the controls rela-tion type is a very important type of relation in the domain of process control.Figure 2. The layered object modelAs mentioned earlier, the layered object model is an extensible object model, i.e. the object model can be extended by the software engineer with new yOM can, for example, be extended with new layer types, but also with new object model components, such as events. One could say that the notion of extensibility, which is a core fea-ture of the object-oriented paradigm, has been applied to the object model itself. Object model extensibility may seem useful in theory, but in order to apply it in practice it requires extensibility of the translator or compiler associated with the language. In the case of LayOM, classes and applications are translated into C++. The generated classes can be combined with existing, hand-written C++ code to form an executable. The LayOM compiler is based on delegating compiler objects, but we refer to [Bosch 96b] for a more detailed description on the implementation of the layered object model.4.2 Acquaintance CommunicationAlmost any object, in the course of its operation, communicates with other objects for achieving its own goals. We refer to the objects that an object needs to communicate with as acquaintances. An acquaintance may provide some services to the object, it might request services from the object or it may both request and provide services. In compo-nent-based systems, the amount of work required from the software engineer to connect the various components should be as little as possible. The component itself should contain the specifications on how to connect to its acquaintances and what requirements an potential acquaintance should fulfil. On the other hand, when a component is used in an unanticipated context, the software engineer requires expressive and modular language constructs to con-nect a component to the other components.Within the context of the layered object model, introduced in the previous section, we have defined a new layer of type Acquaintance. The syntax of the layer type is as follows:<layer-id>:Acquaintance([<obj-name>|<category>] is-bound [permanent|per-call|from <selector> until <selector>] for [one|all|<n>] objects from [inside|<n> contexts|global]); An instance of this layer type is bound based on the name of a called object or based on the name of a category. The actual object that is communicated with may have been bound permanently on object instantiation, bound for every call or during a transaction starting with a<selector> and ending with the same or another<selector>. When selecting the appropriate object to bind the acquaintance to, the search may be inside the object itself, in<n> contexts of the object or globally. The notion of contexts is important in our underlying system view where the objects in the system are organised hierarchically. The first context of the object consists of those objects that are located in the immediate vicinity of the object, i.e. in the same subsystem, etc. The software engineer can define a class as a compo-nent and include layer specifications for all acquaintances of the object. Alternatively, one can define the class and only declare the required acquaintances. When composing a system using that class, the software engineer can add layer specifications for the acquaintances. The latter allows one to define the communicating behaviour of the object independently of the functionality of the object. For reasons of space, the description of Acquaintance layers hasbeen kept extremely brief. However, conceptual dimensions involved in object communication that we identified in section 3 are implemented by the Acquaintance layer type.To illustrate this in the layered object model, we introduce an example from mobile telephony. A physical mobile phone is represented by a mobile phone object in the distributed information system of a mobile telephony operator. A mobile phone object has a number of acquaintances, i.e. a base station object, an operator object and a voice mail object. Since the owner of the physical phone moves around, the phone object also moves through the distributed information system. In some cases, the phone user travels outside the region covered by the operator, in which case another operator that covers the current region provides telephone services for the phone, under the condition that the two operators have such an agreement. Below, part of the LayOM specification for the mobile phone class is shown. class MobilePhonelayersbase :Acquaintance(base-station is-bound per-call for one object from 1 contexts);oper :Acquaintance(operator is-bound from connect-operator until change-operator for one object from global);mail :Acquaintance(voice-mail is-bound permanent for one object from global);...categoriesbase-station begin acq.subClassOf(BaseStation)and acq.owner = operator;end;operator begin self.operator = acq or acq.relatedOperator(self.operator);end;voice-mail begin acq.subClassOf(VoiceMail)and acq.phoneNumber = self.phoneNumber;end;...end;The specification only contains the layer and category definitions for the aforementioned acquaintances of the mobile phone object. The categories describe the discriminating characteristics of the acquaintance objects, whereas the lay-ers describe how to bind actual objects to each acquaintance. The object name acq used in the category specifications is a pseudo variable used to refer to the acquaintance being defined. Note that one could have defined the Mobile-Phone class without the Acquaintance layers. That allows one to add the layer specifications to individual instances of the MobilePhone class, thus creating unique instances.In this section, we have introduced the layered object model and shown how LayOM objects can be used as compo-nents in a component-based system. Each component has acquaintances that it communicates with during its lifetime, but the specification of the selection of and communication with the acquaintances is not well supported in the con-ventional object model and has to be implemented on top of the object model. The layered object model allows for the separation of the functionality of the object and the way it selects its acquaintances, thereby, among others, increasing the reusability and understandability.5 Related WorkThe notion of object communication has also been addressed by others, but most authors aim at defining object group communication. In [Francez et al. 86] the Script approach is introduced. Scripts are language constructs for abstract-ing patterns of communication in which processes can enrol. Contracts [Helm et al. 90] specify object interactions by defining the contractual obligations of each participant (object) in the contract. In [Aksit et al. 94] abstract communi-cation types are introduced as a means to represent the inter-object communication of a group of objects as a single entity. These approaches have in common that they represent the communication within a group of objects (or proc-esses) as a single entity. When compared to the Acquaintance layer, one can recognise that the main difference between those approaches and the LayOM approach is that the Acquaintance layer defines the selection of and com-munication with one of the acquaintances of an object.Another approach aiming at increasing the flexibility of references between objects is defined by smart pointers [Edelson 92]. A smart pointer is an object that is treated in the C++ language model as a pointer. A smart pointer can contain any type of functionality since the class of the smart pointer can be programmed by the software engineer. Although smart pointers are often used for implementing references to distributed and persistent objects, they could be used to implement an important part of the aforementioned dimensions of object communication since they sepa-rate the functionality of an object from the communication with other objects. However, since C++ does not allow for treating the objects in the context of an object as a set for selecting an acquaintance, this approach is more restrictive than the LayOM approach. In addition, the declarative approach in LayOM cannot be supported by smart pointers.。