Graphical Design of Distributed Applications Through Reusable Components

• Authors: Alberto Bartoli;Paolo Corsini;Gianluca Dini;Cosimo Antonio Prete
• Venue: IEEE Parallel & Distributed Technology: Systems & Technology
• Year: 1995

This paper describes a graphical programming environment--named Tracs--designed to facilitate the development of distributed applications involving groups of networked, heterogeneous machines. Tracs places special emphasis on enforcing the use of a suitable methodology for distributed application design, which is split in two major phases: the one devoted to defining the basic design components, the other in which an actual application is built out of them. The resulting modular approach contributes to the facilitation of code reuse and forces programmers to structure their applications in a clean way, with well-defined interfaces between components. A salient feature of Tracs is the novel way in which, solely on the basis of a simple set of design components (message structures, tasks, logical structures of groups of tasks that do not depend on what the single tasks actually do), it provides several advanced facilities that fit neatly in the overall framework and whose functionalities are largely independent of each other. These include the ability to automatically create components especially useful during application development (tasks able to perform several kinds of message analysis and manipulation) and to simplify the definition of components to be used in the application itself (tasks in which the programmer--written code can be fully sequential). The resulting scenario presented to users is powerful, flexible and easy to understand. The user interacts with the environment through a graphical interface based on OSF/Motif. The current prototype runs on top of Unix and provides support for C, C++, Fortran.