Coordination Models and Languages. Software Engineering

摘要

A new class of models, formalisms and mechanisms that recently evolved for211u001edescribing concurrent and distributed computations based on the concept of 211u001e'coordination'. The purpose of a coordination model and associated language is to 211u001eprovide a means of integrating a number of possibly heterogeneous components 211u001etogether, by interfacing with each component in such a way that the collective 211u001eset forms a single application that can execute on and take advantage of parallel 211u001eand distributed systems. In this chapter the authors initially define and present 211u001ein sufficient detail the fundamental concepts of what constitutes a coordination 211u001emodel or language. The authors then go on to classify these models and languages 211u001eas either 'data-driven' (also called 'process-' or 'task-oriented'). Next, the 211u001emain existing coordination models and languages are described in sufficient 211u001edetail to let the reader appreciate their features and put them into perspective 211u001ewith respect to each other. The chapter ends with a discussion comparing the 211u001evarious models and some conclusions.