Soma: a compositional language for distributed systems

Current mobile and distributed applications are being developed using J2ME, J2EE, CORBA, DCOM, etc. Developing applications for distributed and mobile systems is a tedious process, because the applications in these systems are open for change in requirements. So providing a language support for application development in open systems is vital. Component-oriented programming is well suited for open systems [1]. The component interactions is the key issue in composition languages. Software systems can be viewed in two distinct ways. A running system can be seen as a collection of interacting entities. However, at the level of system specification we can view the system as a composition of various software components [1]. To specify systems consisting of interacting components, a composition language is required. Applications built in these languages satisfy the requirements of an open system. Thus there is a need to develop a composition language. The key challenge is to define a set of operators in the language which represent different coordination styles.