A Fresh Look at Programming-in-the-Large

Walter Cazzola, Andrea Savigni, Andrea Sosio, Francesco Tisato

Abstract: Realizing a shift of software engineering towards a component based approach to software development requires the development of higher level programming systems supporting the development of systems from components. The paper presents a novel approach to the design of large software systems where a program in the large describing the system's architecture is executed at run time to rule over the assembly and dynamic cooperation of components. This approach has several advantages following from a clean separation of concerns between programming in the small and programming in the large issues in instantiated systems.