A CRITERION TO ENFORCE CORRECTNESS OF INDIRECTLY COOPERATING APPLICATIONS

Cooperative applications are expected to become commonplace in the fut ure. We are concerned hen with a special case of cooperation called in direct cooperation. The idea of the paper is that a Concurrency Contro l approach better fits to indirect cooperation than a Concurrent Progr amming one. In other words, there do exist syntactic correctness crite ria which define a large sphere of security in which application progr ammers are released from the burden of interaction explicit programmin g. This paper argues this point of view and describes such a criterion : the COO-serializability. It applies for a class of applications whic h cooperate indirectly. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights rese rved.