Safe Composition of Linda-based Components

Abstract

Component-Based Software Development is an emerging discipline in the field of Software Engineering. When constructing component-based systems, we must be sure that the cooperative behaviour of the components and their interaction will be successful. In this paper, we use Linda to specify the interactive behaviour of software components. To do this, we first introduce a process algebra for Linda, and then we define a compatibility relation providing conditions that ensure safe composition. This relation takes into account the state of a shared tuple space which represents the current execution. Indeed, a Linda-based computation is characterized by the store's evolution, so that the set of tuples included into the store governs each computation step. In this context, the success of the composition of a pair of agents in presence of a suitable store can be useful to condition the acceptance of a given component into an open running system. In order to extend our approach to complex systems, where constructing a system involves more than two components, we propose the use of distributed tuple spaces as the glue to join components.