Implementing software connectors through first-class methods

Recently, vast amounts of research efforts have been 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. However, few contemporary programming languages support the explicit notion of connectors, which makes it difficult to practice software development based on software architectural concepts. The authors present their experience in implementing software connectors through first-class methods in the Java programming language. They 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