Business-oriented development of telecommunication services

Abstract

ISBN 9780201309898© ACM, 1998. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in OOPSLA '98: Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages, and Applications: conference proceedings .The development of software for distributed systems, e.g. telecommunication services, is a complex activity. Numerous issues have to be resolved when developing such systems, examples of which are language/system heterogeneity and remoteness of components. Interface definition languages (IDLs) are used as the basis for addressing some of these issues. IDLs allow for the specification of the syntactic aspects of the interfaces of the components in the system to be made. Whilst lending itself to issues of heterogeneity and location transparency, dealing with IDL as the basis for system development is not without its problems. Two of the main problems with IDL are its lack of behaviour and its lack of abstraction. Thus designers should not be constrained to work within the syntactic notations used to implement their systems, nor should they be unaided in how they might better design their systems. In this paper we show how these issues are being addressed in the TOSCA project in its development of a service creation and validation environment.18-22 Octobe