Abstract
Jade is an environment that supports the development of distributed
software. Components may be written in any of a number of different
languages, with a common inter-process communication protocol providing
a uniform interface among the components. A window system allows the user
to interact with many different processes at once. A hierarchical graphics
system is provided for use with documentation and programming, and
for support of monitoring. Monitoring in Jade is also supported by an
extensible mechanism which allows for multiple views of the same process.
The nondeterminism of distributed systems may be controlled in order to
provide repeatability of executions and to aid in testing and debugging.
Finally, the formal specification of inter-process events in Jade is
supported by a communications protocol verifier, allowing run-time
consistency checking. Together, these tools provide a powerful
environment for software prototyping and simulation. This paper is a
summary of work that has been described in [Unger 85], [Lomow 85] and
[Joyce 87].
