Distributed Programming with a Logic Channel-based Coordination Model

Abstract

We present a new coordination model and a small set of programming notations for distributed programming, which can be integrated into very different programming languages (imperative, declarative or object-oriented). Together they allow the development of distributed programs in a compositional way, by assembling different independent pieces of (possibly pre-existing and heterogeneous) code. This approach is similar to many other proposals such as Linda, PCN, CC++, for example, allowing multiparadigm and multilingual integration, and provides a powerful set of concurrent programming techniques, inherited from Concurrent Logic Languages (CLLs), which can be efficiently implemented in distributed systems. The coordination model is based on logic channels; these evolved from the concept of shared logic variables used in CLLs which, with the same expressive power, can be more efficiently implemented in distributed systems. We introduce this coordination model, giving some illustrative examples to show its expressiveness; some implementation issues are also commented on.