An Architecture for Integrating Concurrency Control into Environment Frameworks

Layered and componentized systems promise substantial benefits from dividing responsibilities, but it is still unresolved how to construct a system from pre-esisting, independently developed pieces. Good solutions to this problem, in general or for specific classes of components, should reduce duplicate implementation efforts and promote reuse of large scale subsystems. We tackle the domain of software development environments and present an architecture for retrofitting external concurrency control components onto existing environment frameworks. We describe a sample ECC component, explain how we added concurrency control to a commercial product that had none, and briefly sketch how we replaced the concurrency control mechanism of a research system.