SuperGlue: Component programming with object-oriented signals

Abstract

The assembly of components that can handle continuously changing data results in programs that are more interactive. Unfortunately, the code that glues together such components is often difficult to write because it is exposed to many complicated event-handling details. This paper introduces the SuperGlue language where components are assembled by connecting their signals, which declaratively represent state as time-varying values. To support the construction of interactive programs that require an unbounded number of signal connections, signals in SuperGlue are scaled with object-oriented abstractions. With Super-Glue's combination of signals and objects, programmers can build large interactive programs with substantially less glue code when compared to conventional approaches. For example, the SuperGlue implementation of an email client is around half the size of an equivalent Java implementation. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.