Design guidelines for coordination components

Abstract

The distributed nature of a typical web application combined with the rapid evolution of underlying platforms demands for a plug-in component architecture. Nevertheless, code for controlling distributed activities is usually spread over multiple subsystems, which makes it hard to dynamically reconfigure coordination services. This paper investigates coordination components as a way to encapsulate the coordination of a distributed system into a separate, pluggable entity. In an object-oriented context we introduce two design guidelines (namely, "turn contracts into objects" and "turn configuration into a factory object") that help developers to separate coordination from computation and to develop reusable and flexible solutions for coordination in distributed systems. © 2000 ACM.