Managing evolution of coordination aspects in Open Systems

Most of the work on coordination technology so far has focused on the development of special coordination languages and environments that provide the basic mechanisms for realizing the coordination layer of an open system. Ir is clear that the idea of managing separately the coordination aspect from the computation in a language has a lot of advantages in the development of those systems. Nevertheless, most of the coordination languages do nor take care that additionally to managing coordination requirements, they must manage other kinds of "openness" related requirements in Open Systems. The most important requirement being to support the evolution of the coordination requirements themselves. This problem manifests during the software development process by the development over and over again of solutions to similar coordination problems. To tackle this problem, and instead of proposing a new language, we are attempting to develop an open set of adaptable and reusable software components that realize various useful coordination abstractions. With these components we provide explicit separation of coordination from computation, and facilitate reuse and evolution of coordination aspects in Open Systems.