Component interaction in distributed systems

Modern distributed programming environments commonly restrict programmers to a single form of intercomponent interaction. This forces programmers to emulate other interaction styles in terms of the dominant paradigm, obscuring their intent and resulting in a loss of clarity. Starting from a clear model of interaction between program components, this paper attempts to restore this missing clarity of intent. It achieves this by proposing a language for the specification of interaction styles. The language specifies interactions in terms of asynchronous messages and communicating finite state machines, and is compiled into objects that provide support for distribution transparency and binding. The interaction model is independent of the transport protocol that is used to transmit messages between endpoints and we demonstrate how this clean separation of concerns allows significant performance improvements to be made by extending the classes that provide distribution transparency to take advantage of facilities provided by specific transport protocols.