SPECIFICATION AND ANALYSIS OF SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE USING RAPIDE

Rapide is an event-based, concurrent, object-oriented language specifically designed for prototyping system architectures. Two principle design goals are 1) to provide constructs for defining executable prototypes of architectures and 2) to adopt an execution model in which the concurrency, synchronization, dataflow, and timing properties of a prototype are explicitly represented. This paper describes the partially ordered event set (poset) execution model and outlines with examples some of the event-based features for defining communication architectures and relationships between architectures. Various features of Rapide are illustrated by excerpts from a prototype of the X/Open distributed transaction processing reference architecture.