Manipulation and coupling of object oriented components

摘要

Software components such as objects, applications and computational blocks are linked through a data flow manager and an interface that facilitate data exchange between the components. The interface defines a communication protocol. Components that comply with the protocol can share data, even if such components are associated with unrelated applications. Non-compliant components can be paired with translation objects or controlled by scripts to allow such non-compliant components to be linked to compliant components for data sharing. The data flow manager controls data exchange by determining which components are prepared to share data, and then prompting only prepared components to share data. Data exchange is executed in discrete steps.