BDL, a language of distributed reactive objects

Abstract

We introduce the definition of a language of distributed reactive objects, a Behaviour Description Language (BDL), as a unified medium for specifying, verifying, compiling and validating object-oriented distributed reactive systems. One of the novelties in BDL is its seamless integration into the Unified Modeling Language approach (UML). BDL supports a description of objects interaction which respects both the functional architecture of system designs and the declarative style of diagram descriptions. This support is implemented by means of a partial-order theoretical framework. This framework allows to specify both the causality and the control models of object interactions independently of any hypothesis on the actual configuration of the system. Given the description of such a configuration, the use of BDL offers new perspectives for a flexible verification of systems by modeling them as an asynchronous network of synchronous components. It allows an optimized code generation by using compilation techniques developed for synchronous languages. It permits an accurate validation and test of applications by supporting the manipulation of both causal and control dependencies. BDL aims at maximizing the re-usability of high-level specifications while minimizing programming effort and test-case based validation of distributed systems.