Coordinating distributed objects with declarative interfaces

Abstract

This paper presents an architecture that supports coordination among loosely coupled distributed objects. The architecture has two components: objects that provide a declarative specification of their interface, and system programs that reason with these specifications to provide sophisticated interoperation services. Traditional object-oriented interoperation technologies rely on procedural interface specifications, which do not address the semantics of the operations supported by the object. In addition, traditional approaches provide limited support for automatic interoperation in a dynamic environment. For instance, a resource that is available at compile time may not be available at runtime, or a better resource may become available at runtime. Interoperation based on machine-processable specification of object interfaces reduces the coupling (interdependence) between a client and server, and also shifts the burden of coordination from the programmer to the system.