Declarative specification of the architecture of a software development environment

Abstract

There is an increasing interest in the study of software architectures; however, it still unclear which kind of formalisms and techniques should be used in their design. We study the suitability of a rule‐based, parallel logic language in the specification of the architecture of a complex software system, i.e. a software development environment. We have used as a case study SMILE, an environment for programming‐in‐the‐large. Because of the declarative, concurrent and object‐oriented features of parallel logic programming, we have been able to design a software architecture that emphasizes the dynamics of co‐ordination inside the software development environment. The result of this experience shows the usefulness and some weaknesses of logic languages for specifying and prototyping the software architecture of a distributed interactive system.

An overview of declarative process modelling using logic programming

“…In fact, I and some colleagues developed and animated a software process program in Flat Concurrent Prolog (FCP) (Ambriola et al, 1995). Such a program specifies a simple multi-user environment in which coordination is achieved by a check-in/check-out protocol for reserving documents stored in a central project database.…”

An Open Source Environment for an Agile Development Model

“…In a seminal paper Osterweil introduced the idea that software processes should be programmed just like applications [27], since they "are software, too". This idea is powerful and had the consequence to foster the study of the so called "process engines", namely environments programmed in order to support specific development methods [2,15].…”