Software Connectors a Subset of Communicative Acts
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Below is a table that shows the correspondence between Software Connectors and Communicative Acts. Its my quick and dirty attempt at making a comparison, however its becomes clear, that the Service and Type categorization of Mehta falls cleanly under the Commuicative Acts described by the FIPA standard.
Service (Methta) Type (Mehta) Communicative Acts (FIPA) Communication Stream Request Whenever Coordination Facilitation Arbitrator Call For Proposal,Accept Proposal, Propose, Reject Proposal, Cancel, Agree Conversion Adaptor Proxy Facilitation Distributor Propagate Communication Conversion Procedure Call Request, Cancel Communication Conversion Event Request When Communication Conversion Data Access Query Ref, Query If Facilitation Linkage Confirm, Disconfirm,
Due to the lack of time, I have not made the correspondence with the remaining Communicative Acts like Failure and Inform. Mehta's paper concludes with the following statements:
We do not expect that our framework is complete in its current form. ... We also believe that the four connector services and eight types to be fairly stable.
Some communicative acts don't seem to have a clear correspondence, I may be wrong, however my hunch is that this may prove that the original taxonomy is incomplete. Now of course, I'm glad to have found a more formal underpinning as exposed by its relationship with Communicative Acts. The next step of course is to apply the dimensions, subdimension to communicative acts. My hope is to get some better generalizations. Ultimately, I'll have a more abstract taxonomy to reason about loose coupling.
