DECLARATIVE SPECIFICATION OF THE ARCHITECTURE OF A SOFTWARE-DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT

There is an increasing interest in the study of software architectures; however, it still unclear which kind of formalisms and techniques should be used in their design. We study the suitability of a rule-based, parallel logic language in the specification of the architecture of a complex software system, i.e. a software development environment. We have used as a case study SMILE, an environment for programming-in-the-large. Because of the declarative, concurrent and object-oriented features of parallel logic programming, we have been able to design a software architecture that emphasizes the dynamic of co-ordination inside the software development environment. The result of this experience shows the usefulness and some weaknesses of logic languages for specifying and prototyping the software architecture of a distributed interactive system.