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Coordination Languages versus Strategy Languages

One of the great challenges of software engineering is to find effective mechanisms for the evolutionary development and integration of software components. The basic premise is to separate computation (the basic operations and calculations to be performed) from coordination (the ways is which computations interact and cooperate). It turns out that this separation improves the flexibility and maintainability of software systems.

One example of this approach is the TOOLBUS coordination architecture, in which a process-oriented calculus is used to describe the cooperation protocol between different tools that may be written in different languages. Essentially, tools perform computation steps and the process script tells which steps are performed when by whom.

If we compare this approach to strategy languages for rewriting there is, again, a striking similarity: the strategy language describes when and where each rewrite rule has to be applied.



Paul Klint 2001-06-12