A coordination service for distributed applications

With the recent advances in communications technology and the popularity of the Internet, a large number of distributed Web-based applications are being developed. To ease the development of such applications, software support to facilitate coordination and communication is needed. This paper describes an object-oriented system that provides software support for different aspects of application development, namely session management, coordination and information exchange. In particular, the paper proposes a coordination service as a building block for developing distributed applications. A set of processes or agents that need to coordinate their actions can supply a coordination specification to this service. The service then performs the appropriate lower-level communication to coordinate the actions of the processes as per the specification. We believe that such a service should be available as part of the basic infrastructure for developing Web-based distributed applications. Our framework has been implemented in Java and incorporates the notion of role types to accommodate application development in an open system.