Introducing and practically using an object oriented design automation/prototyping tool

The development of concurrent applications, which consist of several parallel, often distributed, activities that communicate and synchronize with each other, presents challenging logical and technological issues. In common practice, the technological aspects, which are related to the definition of concurrent processes as well as to their interactions, often place constraints on the logical aspects. Consequently, the flexibility that could be attained during design is reduced and, furthermore, an actual implementation where both aspects are deeply intermixed is usually obtained. The aim of the research presented in this paper is twofold. On the one hand, an expressive and flexible language based on object-oriented high-level nets is proposed, so that designers can naturally represent concurrency and synchronization. On the other hand, a powerful support toolset is provided, so that design models based on nets can effectively be transformed into processes while minimizing and clearly separating the interactions with the underlying operating system and network facilities. A case study from an actual project is illustrated.<
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