Diploma Thesis, TU-Vienna, 2010

The development of distributed applications is a complex task that requires efficient communication and coordination between all participants. The space-based computing paradigm (SBC) enables simple collaboration between different peers due to a data-driven interaction style. This thesis describes the formal specification of XVSM (eXtensible Virtual Shared Memory), which represents a exible and extensible SBC middleware that allows loosely coupled systems to coordinate themselves effciently. Based on a simple algebraic foundation and an expressive query language, the semantics of the middleware's core functionality are defined via the specification of modules for basic data access, transactions, coordination and the runtime machine. A meta model is defined for XVSM to bootstrap the behavior of the space with own mechanisms. It is also shown how the middleware can be adapted to support arbitrary coordination laws that exceed the default semantics. The XVSM specification has been used to implement an executable prototype with the functional programming language Haskell. The feasibility of the formal model is proven with this XVSM prototype, for which the architecture and implementation are described in this thesis.