A survey on basic connectors and buffers

Recent years have witnessed an increasing interest about a rigorous modelling of (different classes of) connectors. Here, the term connector is used to name entities that can regulate the interaction of possibly heterogeneous components. Thus, connectors must take care of exogenous coordination, handling all those aspects that lie outside the scopes of individual components. This has led to the development of different frameworks that are used to specify, design, analyse, compare, prototype and implement connector-based middleware and a rigorous mathematical foundation of connectors is crucial for the analysis of exogenously coordinated systems. In this survey, we overview the main features of some notable theories of connectors, namely the algebra of stateless connectors, the tile model, Reo, BIP, nets with boundaries and the wire calculus. We discuss similarities, differences, mutual embedding and possible enhancements.