Ruling the Behavior of Distributed Software Components

A new approach to support the development of distributed software systems is outlined. As far as static aspects are concerned, standard object-oriented design methods are used. Dynamic aspects like status of services or resource handling in objects and methods, however, play the key role in distributed systems. The main contribution of the approach is a method which puts the focus on these aspects right from the beginning of a design. A new formalism based on extended Petri-Nets { so called Object Coordination Nets (OCoNs) { is used to describe the behavior of an object on a per method basis and for the usage of object resources. The formalism is integrated into higher levels of object-oriented design as an additional means to describe dynamic behavior. Integration with a standard sequential object-oriented language like C++ is used to organize method nets in a class context. This provides a type system for the nets as well. The sequential language can be interpreted as lling the computational gaps in the coordination skeleton provided by the OCoN for a method.