EAI — Redundancy of EAIRouterUpdate/EAIBroadcaster with EAISubscriptionOperator/E

Issue: Redundancy of EAIRouterUpdate/EAIBroadcaster with EAISubscriptionOperator/EAIPublicationOperator
Document: UML Profile and Interchange Models for EAI
Section: 6.4.1.7.1 (EAIRouterUpdate and EAIBroadcaster)

Description:
Particularly without the enclosing EAIRouter compound operator (see earlier issue on "The specification of EAIRouter and EAITimer as compound operators"), the EAIRouterUpdate/EAIBroadcaster operator pair update is pretty much redundant with the EAISubscriptionOperator/EAIPublicationOperator pair. Providing the simplified "subscription" model of EAIRouterUpdate does not seem worth the price of complicating what could be a very simple but still useful EAIBroadcaster concept.

Recommendation:
Eliminate the EAIRouterUpdate operator and the concept of the EAIRoutingTable. Instead, define an EAIBroadcaster to simply be a primitive operator with a single input terminal and a single output terminal, with the semantics of copying each message received at the input terminal to the output terminal. The EAIBroadcaster then provides a simple "hub" capability for providing fan-in/fan-out connection points in a message flow. (The name "EAIBroadcaster" is more appropriate than "EAIRouter" for this semantics.)

(Note that, if this recommendation is adopted, it makes moot the previous issue on "Inclusion of the dynamic state "routingTargets" for the EAIRoutingTable".)

–

see above