Programming distributed systems with configuration languages

The importance of using languages to specify the structure of a system as a set of components and their interconnections separately from the functional description of the components has been widely recognised. These languages, sometimes called configuration languages, have a natural application in the description of the structural topology of concurrent and distributed systems. The design of these languages has focussed on developing simple declarative languages only for specification of the structure of the system. The authors present a different approach to configuration languages where they use them as a framework to exploit dynamic restructuring to give elegant and modular solutions to concurrent and distributed problems. They present the programming model CL, study its properties and give some examples. A run-time support for the implementation of the model is also presented