Language and distributed system support for complex organizational services

Abstract

This paper presents a distributed approach and system to support complex distributed application services (briefly: complex services). A basic application service is described by a typed operational interface and is implemented by multiple distributed server instances. Complex services consist of sequential and parallel executions of basic services. They are implemented by a specific execution model. This model allows for specification of complex service execution sequences, for management of data objects to be operated upon, and for flexible binding of requested services to associated servers. This flexibility is mainly achieved by the dynamic routing of objects representing a complex service execution. Specific support for this model is provided by a new high-level language to specify a service/server environment and to describe execution sequences, by an associated runtime environment, and by a supplemental monitor approach to supervise distributed service executions. The paper describes these facilities using examples from the office automation area.