AN ARCHITECTURE DESCRIPTION LANGUAGE FOR MOBILE AGENT APPLICATION SYSTEMS

Existing design methods could not give enough support to the design process of distributed systems which involves mobile computing. Proposed in this paper is a new ADL （architecture description language） that could be applied to distributed systems including mobile agent systems, LXL. LXL takes join-calculus as its formal basis. Since join-calculus has more intension to be designed as a core programming language, a cross-cut is made on join so that it is more suitable to be a specific language. LXL is significantly different from the existing ADLs by introducing the construct of container. A container is defined as a logic location, and also can be regarded as an agent, since a location is defined as a group of running processes residing on a physical site. Thus the concept of a location and a component is unified. With these facilities LXL provides mobile application system design and analysis with enough support.