Coordination and Adaptation Techniques: Bridging the Gap Between Design and Implementation

In this paper we present our work on the construction of composite services for distributed computing environments. In this work we take our theoretical results in formal techniques for exogenous coordination of software components and we apply these techniques to existing practical approaches to distributed systems in the area of service-oriented computing. We address major issues such as (a) the implications of synchrony on the way one designs software, (b) the bridging of protocols with fundamentally different coordination models, and (c) the enriching of theoretically sound models so that they become usable in practical applications. In this paper we report our progress on each of these issues and we discuss the work that still lies ahead of us.