An aspectual component has a provided and a required interface. The required interface includes a participant graph that describes an ideal structure for formulating the behavior of the component. The purpose of a component is to add data members and function members to other components and to modify function members of other components. The provided interface of a component includes both new function members and modified function members.
Connectors connect the provided and required interfaces of other components.
The connection process starts with a level-zero component consisting of very simple class definitions. They focus on software reuse and make both initial software development and maintenance easier. Connectors use regular expressing-like notations to express the embedding of a component into a more elaborate structure. Connectors of aspectual components use clever implementation techniques that would be hard to implement directly in Java by a programmer. Yes, but the architecture description language is integrated with the programming language.