A Group Based Approach for Coordinating Active Objects

Although coordination of concurrent objects is a fundamental aspect of object-oriented concurrent programming, there is only little support for its specification and abstraction at the language level. This is a problem because coordination is often buried in the code of the coordinated objects, leading to a lack of abstraction and reuse. Here we present CoLaS, a coordination model and its implementation based on the notion of Coordination Groups. By clearly identifying and separating the coordination from the coordinated objects CoLaS provides a better abstraction and reuse of the coordination and the coordinated objects. Moreover CoLaS’s high dynamicity provides better support for coordination of active objects.