Separation of concerns with transactional regions

Abstract

Orthogonal regions allow a system represented as a state machine to be decomposed into a set of semi-independent modules. Regions of a state machine are usually not completely independent and interact through synchronization and communication primitives, causing coupling between the regions. As the number of regions in the system grows, these interactions become harder to maintain and the behavior of the system as a whole becomes harder to reason about. We introduce a transactional composition semantics, which overcomes these scalability limitations by implicitly and non-invasively capturing dependencies between regions. The approach is evaluated by comparing a monolithic legacy implementation of a telecommunication component to an implementation based on transactional region composition. Our results show that region-based modularization can achieve complete separation of concerns between the features of a non-trivial system and that the proposed transactional composition semantics enable region-based decomposition to be performed on a large scale. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.