Structure and behavior awareness in themis

ABSTRACT

Structural computing provides techniques and tools to ease the task of developing application infrastructure; infrastructure that provides common services such as persistence, naming, distribution, navigational hypermedia, etc., over a set of application-specific or domain-specific structures. Within structural computing, "structure" refers to a combination of data together with relationships pertaining to that data. Structure servers support the specification and manipulation of structures. One important aspect of structural computing is the power and flexibility it provides application developers constructing new applications. A large part of this power is due to structural computing's ability to provide awareness services for both structure and behavior. We define this concept and describe the awareness services provided by the Themis structural computing environment. The utility of these services are demonstrated by presenting the impact they have had on the InfiniTe information integration environment. In particular, these services help to increase the efficiency and reduce the size of domain-specific applications built using structural computing technology. We conclude by discussing how these services might influence the open hypermedia field and the development of new hypermedia services.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
        D.2.11 Software Architectures
            Subjects: Domain-specific architectures

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.4 Hypertext/Hypermedia
          Subjects: Architectures

General Terms:
Design

Keywords:
awareness, behavior, structural computing, structure, themis