An integrated architecture for distributed applications

The CORDS project addresses all phases in the life cycle of distributed applications: design, development, and management. Workers in each of these phases are faced with added difficulties due to support services that are lacking or too low-level. CORDS provides a set of higher-level tools and a service environment that simplifies the tasks of these workers. The realization of such an environment requires the integration and interaction of many distributed system components and the amalgamation of results from different areas in distributed computing.One of the primary goals of the project is to define an architecture for a distributed computing environment that incorporates the necessary tools and services. This paper introduces such an architecture: the CORDS Architecture. The focus of the architecture is to define the CORDS Service Environment, which consists of CORDS services and the CORDS Service Interface. In addition, we illustrate how the prototypes being developed within the CORDS project can be integrated into a system that realizes this architecture.