ABSL: an actor-based specification language for office automation

• Authors: Hossein Saiedian;Elizabeth A. Unger
• Venue: CSC '90 Proceedings of the 1990 ACM annual conference on Cooperation
• Year: 1990

Applications for use in an office environment are often very difficult to implement and/or prototype. One reason for such difficulty is the unavailability of an appropriate specification methodology through which an office analyst can specify the functional behavior of office applications at a high-level of abstraction and in a non-procedural fashion to the implementors. As a result, a great deal of effort, time, and money is often spent on “re-inventing the wheel” whenever a new office system concept is to be developed and/or prototyped. In this paper, we address the above problem by introducing a formal specification methodology, called ABSL, to be used for the specification of applications for offices. In this new methodology, which is based on the actor model, every office entity is uniformly viewed as an active computing component, or an active object. Each active object is viewed as a self-contained entity that models a logical or physical component appearing in an office environment. An example is provided to show the expressiveness of ABSL. Plans for future research in this area are given at the end of paper.