CORODS: A Coordination Programming System for Open Distributed Systems

Open Distributed Systems are the dominating intellectual issue of the research in distributed systems. Figuring out how to build and maintain those systems becomes a central issue in distributed systems research today. Although CORBA seems to provide all the necessary support to the construction of those systems, CORBA provides a very limited support to the evolution of their requirements. The main problem is that the description of the elements from which the systems are built, and the way in which they are composed are mixed into the application code, making systems difficult to understand, modify and customize. A possible solution to this problem goes through the introduction of the so-called coordination models and languages into the CORBA model. We propose in this paper a coordination programming system called CORODS which introduces the CoLaSD coordination model and language into the CORBA model. CoLaSD is a coordination model based on the notion of Coordination Groups, entities that specify, control and enforces the coordination of groups of collaborating active objects.