Coordinating Behavioral Descriptions of Components

Abstract

Component-based Software Development is an emerging discipline in the field of Software Engineering. In this context, coordination languages may be used to specify the interactive behavior of software components. Our proposal is oriented towards defining a framework for describing the behavior of components in terms of coordination models. In particular, we define a way to complement interface descrip- tion languages in order to describe components such that the information about the services provided by a component can be extended with details on how these services should be used. We illustrate our approach by applying the proposed framework to two substantially different coordination models: Linda and Reo; the former represent- ing the family of data-oriented coordination models, and the latter a new channel-based model. Although we consider both models to show the feasibility of our proposal we hope this study help us to define an interaction description language based on Reo for component coordination, as has already been done in the context of Linda.