The internet today provides a wide range of services associated with web sites; examples include getting a stock quote, making an airline reservation, compressing a file or inverting a matrix. Each service may be likened to a basic operation in a computer, the internet computer. An application is a program written over the basic services, i.e., an orchestration of the services. This research is directed toward designing, implementing and studying an appropriate model of orchestration that would allow us to develop wide-area applications succinctly.
Just as structured programming gave programmers effective tools to organize the control flow of sequential programs, this research introduces mechanisms to organize the communication, synchronization and coordination in programs that run on wide-area networks. The objective is to develop a robust model of structured wide-area programming, which has constructs to orchestrate the concurrent invocation of services to achieve a goal -- while managing time-outs, priorities, and failure of sites or communication. Specific research goals include enhancing the model to support transactions and extensible data formats, evaluating our model's effectiveness in coding and verifying sizable applications, developing the theoretical foundations for a process algebra for the internet, and designing implementations on distributed platforms with integration to existing languages.
