What I'm showing here is what an architectural configuration of
a system might look like in practice. And as you
can see, the configuration includes a set of components, which
are these rectangles over here. The components have various kinds of
ports, which are the ones marked here on the components
with different graphical representations. And
the components communicate through various
types of connectors, which are the grey elements here which
as you can see are used to connect the different components.
And something else that you can notice by looking at
this configuration is the fact that you can also have
hierarchically decomposable components. For example, if you look at the strategy
analyzer component, you can see that it has three subcomponents: one,
two, and three and two internal connectors as part of
it. And it is worth recalling here that a component
diagram as we said when first discussed in UML in
the course, can also be used to represent an architectural configuration.
So sometimes you will see architectural
configurations represented as UML component diagrams.