CAB: An environment for developing concurrent application

Abstract

The development of concurrent applications, which consist of several parallel, often distributed, activities that communicate and synchronize with each other, presents challenging logical and technological issues.

In the common practice, technological aspects, which are related to the definition of concurrent processes as well as of their interactions, often place constraints on the logical ones. Consequently, the flexibility that could be attained during design is reduced and, further, an actual implementation where both aspects are deeply intermixed is usually obtained. This paper first presents an expressive and flexible language based on object-oriented high-level nets, which allows designers to naturally represent concurrency and synchronization. Then, it illustrates a powerful software engineeering environment, CAB (Concurrent Applications Builder), which supports the building and the simulation/animation of models as well as the automatic generation of applications from models (by transforming the model's objects into implementation processes). A case study from an actual project is illustrated.