Coordination Framework Based Software Development Approach and Its Applications

The complex software systems often involve many subsystems or components. Coordination among subsystems or components is a central issue in complex software development. The complexity of today software systems requires separation of coordinating entities from computational entities and runtime coordination. The paper presents a coordination framework that divides the system into coordinators and computational entities. The computational entities are represented as roles, processes and services so as to provide coordination with fine granularity. The coordinators are responsible for coordination among the roles. In our framework, coordinators are divided into three types: resource coordinator, communication coordinator and task coordinator. A set of general purposed data table I/O APIs are developed for relational databases, and some frequently used table I/O manipulations are provided as templates. In the paper, the strategies of coordination-oriented software development are discussed. A coordination framework based application development approach is proposed by a practical Commodity Trading System.