Foundations for Reasoning About (Practical) Implicit Invocation Systems

大规模系统设计和进化的一个关键问题是选择一种架构风格，这种风格允许将单独开发的组件集成到更大的系统中。熟悉的样式包括基于远程过程调用、共享变量、异步消息传递等的样式。系统组合的一个日益重要的体系结构风格是隐式调用（II）。然而，关于II系统的推理还没有确定的基础。特别是很难回答这样的问题：宣布一个给定的事件会有什么影响？是否声明了足够的事件绑定？给定的组件是否宣布了足够的事件以允许有效的集成？如果我在现有系统中添加新组件，会破坏现有系统吗？这个项目的目标是为使用II架构风格设计的系统提供推理的基础。预计会有两个主要好处。第一个好处是朝着能够对以这种风格构建的系统进行充分推理迈出了一步。第二个可能更重要的好处是，用一组合理的想法取代目前使用II风格的从业者使用的特别推理方法，这些方法允许对此类系统进行更好的非正式推理。* * *

A critical issue for large-scale systems design and evolution is the choice of an architectural style that permits the integration of separately-developed components into larger systems. Familiar styles include those based on remote procedure call, shared variables, asynchronous message passing, etc. One increasingly important architectural style for system composition is implicit invocation (II). However, there is no established basis for reasoning about II systems. In particular it is difficult to answer questions like: What will be the effect of announcing a given event? Have enough event bindings been declared? Does a given component announce the sufficient events to permit effective integration? If I add a new component to an existing system, will it break the existing system? The goal of this project is to provide such a basis for reasoning about systems designed using the II architectural style. Two central benefits are expected. The first benefit is a step towards being able to reason fully about systems constructed in this style. The second and probably more important benefit is to replace current ad hoc reasoning approaches used by practitioners who use the II style with a collection of sound ideas that allow better informal reasoning about such systems. ***