Visual Design and Animation of Dynamic Parallel and Distributed Software Architectures

Visual languages have been used for some time to support the development of parallel and distributed programs. However, these languages usually tend to focus exclusively on the visual (program) design structure, in terms of the components (processes) and their interconnections represented as boxes and lines, or on the visual behaviour of the components represented as data or control ows, depicting a sequence of statements. Another limitation of most current languages is that they assume that the structure of the program design is static, where the number of components and their connections is known a priori. In this paper , we put forward an alternative visual language and a support toolset, which extends the traditional visual design structure with behavioural information , and at the same time allows the representation of dynamic design structures.