Interaction-Oriented Programming: An Application Semantics Approach for Engineering Decentralized Applications

ABSTRACTInteraction-Oriented Programming (IOP) refers to multiagent concepts, languages, and programming models for engineering applications that are characterized by interactions between autonomous parties. Such applications arise in domains such as e-commerce, health care, and finance. Owing to the autonomy of the principals involved, such applications are conceptually decentralized. We demonstrate how to specify a decentralized application flexibly and how to engineer correct, fault-tolerant endpoints (agents) for the principals in a straightforward manner. Notably, the entire application is realized as agents communicating over an unordered, unreliable messaging infrastructure (our implementations in fact use UDP). IOP departs from traditional distributed systems approaches that rely on guarantees in the application's communication infrastructure, e.g., for ordering and fault tolerance. Notably, IOP shows how to address application semantics, the holy grail of distributed systems.