Towards a Balanced Specification Language for Distributed Object Computing Patterns

Abstract

Despite the benefits offered by distributed object computing, there are a lot of key challenges that need to be addressed when developing distributed applications. Design patterns help alleviate those challenges by shifting the developer's focus towards high-level design concerns rather than platform-specific details. However, the inherent ambiguity of existing textual and graphical descriptions of design patterns does not help users understand and apply them easily. Formal specification of design patterns is not meant to replace existing means of pattern descriptions, but to complement them in order to achieve accuracy and allow rigorous reasoning about them. The main problem of existing formal specification languages for design patterns is lack of completeness. This is mainly because they tend to focus on specifying either the structural or behavioural aspect of design patterns, but not both of them. We propose a simple yet balanced pattern specification language (BPSL) that is intended to achieve equilibrium by specifying both aspects of design patterns. The language combines two subset of logic, one from first-order logic and one from temporal logic of actions.