Merging Logic Programming into Web-based technology: a Coordination-based approach

Current WWW technology is becoming the de-facto standard platform for groupware applications, yet it provides virtually no effective coordination capabilities. New applications, instead, demand higher-level middleware services, with intelligent behaviours, deductive capabilities, and effective coordination. In this work we discuss a possible extension to the current Web-based architectures whose aim is to support the integration between logic-based and conventional components, and to introduce the concept of programmable communication abstraction. Within the framework of the current Java-based architecture, logic programming is used as a base for Linda-like coordination. Thus, the coordination medium may be interpreted as the theory of communication, and exploited for reasoning over communication and for introspection over the overall system state. Logic programming is also used to define reactions to communication events, which allow the communication abstraction behaviour to be extended and tailored to achieve specific coordination policies.