Terminology
Throughout this document some domain specific terminology is used that may have connotations outside CAmkES/component systems. To avoid confusion the meanings of these terms are made explicit below.
Abstract Syntax Tree (AST)
An internal representation of the results of parsing a generalised grammar. More thorough definitions of ASTs are provided elsewhere, but this is noted here because the abbreviation ‘AST’ is used heavily in this documentation.
Architecture Description Language (ADL)
The CAmkES syntax for describing a component system. Most component platforms have their own architecture description language for describing a set of components and how they are wired together, but the term ‘ADL’ will be used in this documentation to exclusively refer to the CAmkES input specification language.
Assembly
A top-level element that encapsulates a component system description. An assembly can be thought of as a complete description of a full system. A system must contain at least one assembly. A system with more than one assembly is equivalent to a system with one assembly whose composition and configuration sections are the concatenation of the composition and configuration sections of each assembly.
Attribute
Components and connectors can have extra data of an arbitrary type associated with them. These are referred to as attributes. The description of a component/connector must describe the name of the attribute and its type. The value of the attribute itself is unspecified. It is assigned when the entity is instantiated, and this assignment is referred to as a setting. Attributes are generally used to specialise or differentiate a component at runtime.
Component
A type of functional entity. It is important to stress this distinction. ‘Component’ is used colloquially to refer to both types and instances, but in a formal sense ‘component’ refers only to the type. To make this more concrete, the statement component foo f describes a component instance f, whose type is foo.
Composition
A container for the component and connector instantiations that form a system. This is essentially a syntactic element for delimiting sections in a specification. It is contained by an assembly block, along with an optional configuration.
Compound Component
A component with a composition section, and optionally a configuration section.
Configuration
A container for describing settings. This is a syntactic element to hold the assignment of attributes for a given system. It is expressed inside an assembly block.
Connection
An instantiation of a connector. Connections connect two instances. Because the instantiation of a connector does not really specialise the connector in any particular way, it is easy to conflate the two. However, the sources make important distinctions between connectors and connections.
Connector
A type of link between instances. The distinction between ‘connector’ and ‘connection’ is the same as that between ‘component’ and ‘instance,’ i.e. a connection is an instantiation of a particular connector.
Consumes
Event interfaces that are accepted by a component. If a component consumes a particular event it means that it is expecting to receive and handle that event.
Dataport
Port interfaces that are used by a component. A component’s dataports are expected to be available to it at runtime as shared memory regions.
Direction
The flow of a parameter of a procedure method. The only possible directions are ‘in’ (caller to callee), ‘out’ (callee to caller), ‘inout’ (bidirectional) and ‘refin’ (identical to ‘in’ except for the C backend where this is optimised to pass-by-reference).
Emits
Event interfaces that are expressed by a component. If a component emits a given event it means that it produces events of this type.
Event
An asynchronous signal interface of a component. Events are defined completely by their identifier, a numerical value. It may be helpful to think of this value as mapping to something like an interrupt number or a signal type, although they do not necessarily represent hardware messages.
Export Connector
A special type of connector which can only appear inside a compound component’s composition section. It can be used to connect one of the compound component’s interfaces to an interface of an internal instance declared in the compound component’s composition section. Interfaces of compound components connected with an export connector are considered “Virtual Interfaces”. Interfaces of internal instances connected to virtual interfaces are known as “Exported Interfaces”.
Exported Interface
An interface of an internal instance connected to a virtual interface with an export connector.
Instance
An instantiation of a component type. Of course ‘instance’ can be used to refer to an instantiation of any type, but when you see the term ‘instance’ in the sources it is generally referring to the instantiation of a component. To give a concrete example, in the statementcomponent foo f f is an instance.
Interface
An abstract exposed interaction point of a component. There could be a distinction made here between type and instance of one of these interaction points, but in practice this is not necessary and ambiguity rarely arises. The subcategories of interface are procedure, eventand port.
Interface Definition Language (IDL)
A subset of CAmkES ADL for describing interfaces of components. Previously this was considered distinct from ADL, but now the term ‘ADL’ is intended to encompass both syntaxes. The CAmkES IDL subset is heavily inspired by OMG IDL.
Internal Instance
A component instance declared inside a compound component’s composition section.
Internal Connection
A connection declared inside a compound component which connects two internal instance interfaces. That is, any connection declared inside a compound component which does not use an export connector.
Method
An item of a procedure. When targeting a conventional programming language, methods usually map directly to generated functions.
Parameter
A piece of data referenced by a procedure method. This can be thought of as an argument to a function.
Port
The interface type that represents shared memory semantics.
Procedure
An interface with function call semantics. Procedures consist of a series of methods that can be invoked independently.
Provides
Procedure interfaces implemented by a component. When targeting a conventional programming language this typically means that the component contains functions that are implementations of each method in the procedures provided.
Setting
An assignment of an attribute to a specific value. A setting does not specify the type of the attribute, because this has already been described by the attribute as specified in the component/connector description.
Type
A procedure method’s return type or parameter type. This information does not include the direction of a parameter. An example type is something like ‘string.’
Uses
Procedure interfaces that are invoked by a component. When targeting a conventional programming language this typically means that the component contains calls to functions that are expected to implement each method in the procedures used.
Virtual Interface
An interface of a compound component connected to an internal instance’s interface using an export connector.
A concrete example:
procedure thing {
int func(in int x);
}
event sig = 42;
dataport Buf buffer;
component foo {
control;
uses thing t1;
emits sig s1;
dataport buffer b1;
}
component bar {
provides thing t2;
consumes sig s2;
dataport buffer b2;
}
assembly {
composition {
component foo f;
component bar b;
connection RPC c1(from f.t1, to b.t2);
connection Notification c2(from f.s1, to b.s2);
connection SharedData c3(from f.b1, to b.b2);
}
}
- thing is a procedure
- int is a type
- func is a method
- in is a direction
- x is a parameter
- sig is an event
- buffer is a port
- foo and bar are components
- t1 is a uses
- s1 is a emits
- b1 and b2 are dataports
- t2 is a provides
- s2 is a consumes
- assembly { … } is an assembly
- composition { … } is a composition
- f and b are instances
- RPC, Notification and SharedData are connectors
- c1, c2 and c3 are connections