Coordination

Definition

Coordination is about managing dependencies between activities, processes, and components. Unlike the classical computation models, a coordination model puts much more emphasis on communication and cooperation than computation.

Key Points

Turing machines are a nice illustration of the classical “computation-oriented” view of systems. However, this view is too limited for many applications (e.g., web services). Many systems can be viewed as a collection of interacting entities (e.g., communicating Turing machines). For example, in the context of a service oriented architecture (SOA) coordination is more important than computation. There exist many approaches to model and support coordination. Linda is an example of a language to model coordination and communication among several parallel processes operating upon objects stored in and retrieved from a shared, virtual, associative memory [1]. Linda attempts to separate coordination from computation by only allowing interaction...