Logically Central, Physically Distributed Control in a Process Runtime Environment
Aaron G. Cass, Barbara Staudt Lerner, Eric K. McCall, Leon J. Osterweil, Alexander Wise · 1999
An effective process definition language must be powerful, yet clear. It must also have well defined semantics to support powerful and definitive analysis. End users require that a runtime interpreter for the language faithfully implement the semantics used in analysis of process definitions, and that the interpreter be efficient and scalable. In addition to all of the above, the language, and its interpreter must also be readily evolvable. In this paper, we describe the architecture of Juli-ette, a process execution environment designed to address all of these requirements. We outline the tensions posed by these strong objectives and describe Juliette’s modular approach and its novel distribution strategy, indicating how they address the tensions set by our objectives. While we ex-plain the Juliette architectural approach in the context of the interpretation of Little-JIL, the approach applies to the inter-pretation of a broad class of process definition languages.