A Preliminary Comparative Study on the Expressive Power of Reo and Linda

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, and most of the proposals presented in the literature are based on shared data-space models, as Linda. On the other hand, a new model for coordination based on communication channels (Reo) is also emerging, and we argue it also can be used to describe component protocols in a very elegant way. Making a comparative analysis on the expressiveness of this channel based model and Linda is the main objective of the present work, which presents a first step to make an exhaustive formal study. Thus, in this paper we provide a couple of modular embeddings for the synchronous case and the asynchronous case by defining a common formalism in order to allow the comparison of both models at an homogeneous level of abstraction. We hope these results will help us to develop a complete study about the Reo's expressiveness, and to define an interaction description language based on Reo for component coordination, as it has already made in the context of Linda.