| Description |
Although distribution and parallelism are not central features of the OO approach, the recent growth in deployment of complex distributed applications has created the need for integrating distributed systems requirements into OO modelling techniques. Explicit or potential concurrency, the need for synchronization, resource usage, allocation, and distribution have to be modelled adaequately in order to meet these requirements. Similar aspects become more and more relevant for workflow languages and systems: models based on simplifying closed world assumptions are not adaequate for advanced business processes involving companies spread over the globe. The different roles of the structural components of a company when involved in a set of concurrently executing workflows, the interpretation of their resources in a manner close to the resource view in distributed systems, the need for synchronisation and coordination between different parts of a single workflow and, more importantly, between workflows running in parallel, show the importance of the expertise emerging in the distributed software engineering community for workflow modeling and implementation. On the other hand, workflow technology and real-life workflow applications are highly relevant for the software engineering community, since workflow management has created languages, techniques, and tools to model, simulate, monitor, and control the execution of business processes in complex technical and organizational environments. It is likely that these concepts, techniques, and tools can be used to add support to distributed systems applications.
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