The design of a next-generation process language

Process languages remain a vital area of software process research. Among the important issue for process languages are semantic richness, ease of use, appropriate abstractions, process composability, visualization, and support for multiple paradigms. The need to balance semantic richness with ease of use is particularly critical. JIL addresses these issues in a number of innovative ways. It models processes in terms of steps with a rich variety of semantic attributes. The JIL control model combines proactive and reactive control, conditional control, and more simple means of control-flow modeling via step composition and execution constraints. JIL facilitates ease of use through semantic factoring, the accommodation of incomplete step specifications, the fostering of simple sub-languages, and the ability to support visualizations. This approach allows processes to be programmed in a variety of terms, and to a variety of levels of detail, according to the needs of particular processes, projects, and programmers.