Towards Advanced Interaction Design Concepts

In this paper we analyse the interaction mechanisms provided by Web services technology and by CORBA. Specifically we analyse the request/response, callback, polling and (multicast) message passing mechanisms. As a result we present coloured Petri nets that capture the behaviour of these mechanisms precisely. Based on our analysis we define concepts for representing the Web services and CORBA interactions in a suitable and platform independent manner. These concepts can be used for platform independent design of distributed applications, while they (provably) maintain the consistency with platform specific implementations. Because their behaviour is defined by Petri nets, the concepts also support simulation, validation and verification of designs. We also evaluate the suitability of UML's concepts for representing the mechanisms and the degree of platform independence that these concepts can achieve