An efficient data interface for heterogeneous distributed environments

Abstract

The development of heterogeneous distributed environments has provided opportunities for the development of complex applications requiring interactions among software modules written in different languages. This necessitates a data interface to allow transmission of suitable data types and data structures among different languages. This paper first introduces a novel multi-language based data interface system for heterogeneous distributed processing, then covers a prototyped environment based on this system, and finally presents an evaluation of the prototyped system. The focus of the paper is on the semantics of data structure transmission. By separating the primitive data values from the structure information of a data structure (descriptors), it is possible to perform the data type checking and data conversion operations in pipelined fashion. In addition, the re-generation of the structure information can be avoided by caching such data when they are generated for the fmt time.The current prototype environment supports C and Pascal languages. However, the model presented here can be extended to other languages as well.

From Logic Specification to y-calculus

“…For example, let us consider an online course material maintenance system, which was studied in F. Lin, Lin, and Holt (2003), H. Lin (2004), and H. Lin and Yang (2006). The conversation schema is shown in Figure 1.…”

“…As a matter of fact, the background system has other functionalities that we do not address here (F. O. Lin et al, 2003). Our point is to describe our methodology to specify agent conversation in a distributed system.…”