Shall the Following Interfaces for Building Applications be Adopted into the CCA Specification?

Motion

This is a set of interfaces that are complete enough to allow a programmer to manipulate a CCA compliant framework to create an application. It allows for component discovery, instantiation, connection, and destruction. It is powerful enough retrieve ports and invoke methods on them, yet still abstracts the implementation of the framework mechanisms. Of particular interest is the incarnation of this interface in a scripting language, allowing rapid application development for HPC.

This motion includes the following interfaces:

• AbstractFramework provides simple control over the framework itself as well as a means for the programmer to create an image of his/her code inside the framework as a component.
• BuilderService, a kind of Port that provides framework services to create, manipulate, connect and destroy components.
• ComponentRepository that provides a skeleton interface for a local pallet of components. It is expected to be filled out in the coming months by the experts in that area.
• ComponentClassDescription an interface to describe a component in a ComponentRepository.
• ConnectionID provides a handle with which to refer to a connection between components.
• ComponentID is modified from the previous interface to eliminate the method: toString() in favor of two more useful methods.

Motivation

It is generally observed that user programmers are shy about buying-in to other people's frameworks in order to build applications. It would enhance the useability of CCA components if framework functionality could be exported in a standard manner. This would also allow useful but hard to write components like CCA GUI's to be available to all CCA compliant frameworks. This proposal will also allow programmers to construct and run their own applications from a scripting language or from a main() program.