Rational design of distributed applications

Abstract

Although numerous distributed programming facilities have been developed, the lack of methodologics to support the design of distributed applications makes the task of designers very difficult. The aim of our work is to contribute to the design of complete distributed applications, stressing first and foremost the quality of the final systems. To reach this goal we propose a software development environment based on a three-phased approach : analysis, design and construction. We will focus on the design and construction phases so as to define the architecture of the application, and to propose an implementation on a technical environment based on a distributed application model including the virtual node concept. Our approach uses the VDM formal method to support the design phase and the Conic distributed language and environment as the target for the implementation.KeywordsDistributed applicationprogramming in the largereliabilityformal specificationrefinementvirtual nodemoduleportcommunication