Using COALA to develop a distributed object-based application

COALA is a new language for high level design of distributed object applications. The design concepts used in COALA are those of Coordinated Atomic Actions (J. Xu et al., 1995), which propose a unified transactional approach to structuring complex concurrent activities and supporting error recovery. COALA integrates several formal techniques (D. Buchs and N. Guelfi, 2000) in order to address verification and validation issues. The paper presents a case study of a distributed object application designed in COALA. The main contribution of this case study consists of validating the research value of the COALA language. This case study is concerned with the design of an Auction Service system. Our experiment shows that COALA is indeed helpful in designing the static and dynamic structure of complex concurrent systems. It offers a flexible way of dealing with the cooperation and competition of systems as well as with fault tolerance issues. This case study is a mandatory step before pursuing the development of COALA and considering the development of professional distributed object applications.