Beyond the black box: event-based inter-process communication in process support systems

We describe the concept and implementation of an inter-process communication facility based on the exchange of events between concurrently running processes. In contrast to previous approaches based on shared data stored in a common database, our approach has the advantage of being platform independent and providing straightforward support for distribution. In addition, we also explore the problem of process atomicity and consistency when events are revoked due to the abort of processes. We present a family of recovery protocols that allow to control the effects of aborted processes.