A survey of linguistic structures for application-level fault tolerance

VD Florio, C Blondia - ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), 2008 - dl.acm.org
ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), 2008dl.acm.org
Structures for the expression of fault-tolerance provisions in application software comprise
the central topic of this article. Structuring techniques answer questions as to how to
incorporate fault tolerance in the application layer of a computer program and how to
manage the fault-tolerant code. As such, they provide the means to control complexity, the
latter being a relevant factor for the introduction of design faults. This fact and the ever-
increasing complexity of today's distributed software justify the need for simple, coherent …
Structures for the expression of fault-tolerance provisions in application software comprise the central topic of this article. Structuring techniques answer questions as to how to incorporate fault tolerance in the application layer of a computer program and how to manage the fault-tolerant code. As such, they provide the means to control complexity, the latter being a relevant factor for the introduction of design faults. This fact and the ever-increasing complexity of today's distributed software justify the need for simple, coherent, and effective structures for the expression of fault-tolerance in the application software. In this text we first define a “base” of structural attributes with which application-level fault-tolerance structures can be qualitatively assessed and compared with each other and with respect to the aforementioned needs. This result is then used to provide an elaborated survey of the state-of-the-art of application-level fault-tolerance structures.
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