Coordination Technologies for Just-in-Time Integration

Whereas the emphasis of research in “Formal Methods” has been mainly directed to help developers in taming the complexity of constructing new systems, the challenge today is on evolution, namely on endowing system components with agility in responding to change and dynamically procuring collaborations from which global properties of the system can emerge. As a result, we are running the risk of building a new generation of legacy systems: systems in which interactions are too tightly coupled and rigid to operate in application environments that are “time critical”, for instance those that make use of Web Services, B2B, P2P or operate in what is known as “internet-time”. We suggest, and demonstrate, that support for “agility” can be found in what we call “coordination technologies” – a set of analysis techniques, modelling primitives, design principles and patterns that we have been developing for externalising interactions into explicit, first-class entities that can be dynamically superposed, “just-in-time”, over system components to coordinate their joint behaviour.