Washington University in St. Louis
Washington University Open Scholarship
All Computer Science and Engineering Research
Computer Science and Engineering
Report Number: WUCS-95-17
1995-01-01
Formal Specification of a Dynamically
Configurable Distributed System
Authors: Ram Sethuraman and Kenneth J. Goldman
The Programmers' Playground is a programming environment that supports end-user construction of
distributed multimedia applications. The system implements a new programming model that is based, in part,
upon ideas from the formal I/O automaton model of Lynch and Tuttle. Important features of The
Programmers' Playground are a separation of communication and computation and graphical support for
dynamic reconfiguration.
This paper provides a formal specification of the Playground programming model and runtime system in
terms of the I/O automaton model on which it is based. Exploiting the compositionality properties of the I/O
automaton model, the formal specification is describd as a composition of several modules. A behavioral
specification of each module is presented, followed by an I/O automaton that implements each specification.
We present the specification in two stages, a centralized specification that captures the allowable behaviors,
and then a detailed distributed implementation.
... Read complete abstract on page 2.
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Recommended Citation
Sethuraman, Ram and Goldman, Kenneth J., "Formal Specification of a Dynamically Configurable Distributed System" Report
Number: WUCS-95-17 (1995). All Computer Science and Engineering Research.
http://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cse_research/376
Department of Computer Science & Engineering - Washington University in St. Louis
Campus Box 1045 - St. Louis, MO - 63130 - ph: (314) 935-6160.
Formal Specification of a Dynamically Configurable Distributed System
Complete Abstract:
The Programmers' Playground is a programming environment that supports end-user construction of
distributed multimedia applications. The system implements a new programming model that is based, in part,
upon ideas from the formal I/O automaton model of Lynch and Tuttle. Important features of The
Programmers' Playground are a separation of communication and computation and graphical support for
dynamic reconfiguration.
This paper provides a formal specification of the Playground programming model and runtime system in
terms of the I/O automaton model on which it is based. Exploiting the compositionality properties of the I/O
automaton model, the formal specification is describd as a composition of several modules. A behavioral
specification of each module is presented, followed by an I/O automaton that implements each specification.
We present the specification in two stages, a centralized specification that captures the allowable behaviors,
and then a detailed distributed implementation.
This technical report is available at Washington University Open Scholarship: http://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cse_research/376