Abstractions of Interaction Mechanisms

The design of distributed applications is a complex undertaking, especially if the designers are forced to immediately deal with the detailed behaviour of the underlying middleware. It would be better if the designers could first focus on the essentials of the applications using suitable abstractions of interaction mechanisms that are provided by communication middleware. In this paper we present a method for abstracting a structure of interactions into a more abstract interaction. We apply this method to obtain the abstractions of common interaction mechanisms. The abstractions of interaction mechanisms are defined using the same interaction design concept as used to define other interactions. The abstractions can thus be manipulated in the same way as any other interactions. The correctness of an abstraction with respect to the interaction mechanism it represents is assessed by checking whether a set of conformance requirements are satisfied.