EXTENDING GROUP COMMUNICATION FACILITIES TO SUPPORT COMPLEX DISTRIBUTED OFFICE PROCEDURES
- 1 June 1994
- journal article
- Published by World Scientific Pub Co Pte Ltd in International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems
- Vol. 3 (2) , 203-223
- https://doi.org/10.1142/s0218215794000132
Abstract
Complex distributed office procedures are based on sequential and parallel execution of basic services offered by a distributed service environment. Office procedure execution can be considered to be a special kind of group communication with groups of collaborating servers. This paper first presents a general group communication abstraction. We then show in detail how the generic approach has been extended and specialized in order to support complex office procedures. The extended solution comprises a graph-based, declarative specification notation for office procedures, and a distributed runtime support environment. This maps office procedure service requests dynamically to actual servers for execution. Moreover, additional management facilities enable external supervision of office procedures. Based on examples, we show how applications can benefit from the abstractions. By discussing their similarities and evolution, we also outline the strong relationship between group communication and office procedures.Keywords
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