Coordination Mechanisms in Complex Software Systems

Software developers have to deal with software systems which are usually composed of distributed, heterogeneous and interacting application components representing higher-level business goals. Although the message-passing paradigm is a common concept allowing application components to interact with each other in an asynchronous manner, the technology is not entirely suitable for complex coordination requirements since the processing and state of coordination have to be handled explicitly by the application component. Data-driven frameworks support the coordination of application components, but have a limited number of coordination policies requiring from the software developer to implement coordination functionality that is not directly supported by the coordination framework. We illustrate the Space-Based Computing (SBC) paradigm aiming to support and facilitate software developers efficiently in their efforts to control complexity regarding concerns of interaction in software systems. Major results of the evaluation in this context are improved coordination efficiency accompanied with reduced complexity within application components.