The development process of any software has become extremely important not just in the IT industry, but in almost every business or domain of research. The effort in making this process quick,... Show moreThe development process of any software has become extremely important not just in the IT industry, but in almost every business or domain of research. The effort in making this process quick, efficient, reliable and automated has constantly evolved into a flow that delivers software incrementally based on both the developer's best skills and the end user's feedback. Software modeling and modeling languages have the purpose of facilitating product development by designing correct and reliable applications. The concurrency model of the Abstract Behavioural Specification (ABS) Language with features for asynchronous programming and cooperative scheduling is an important example of how modeling contributes to the reliability and robustness of a product. By abstracting from the implementation details, program complexity and inner workings of libraries, software modeling, and specifically ABS, allow for an easier use of formal analysis techniques and proofs to support product design. However there is still a gap that exists between modeling languages and programming languages with the process of software development often going on two separate paths with respect to modeling and implementation. This potentially introduces errors and doubles the development effort. \par The overall objective of this research is bridging the gap between modeling and programming in order to provide a smooth integration between formal methods and two of the most well-known and used languages for software development, the Java and Scala languages. The research focuses mainly on sequential and highly parallelizable applications, but part of the research also involves some theoretical proposals for distributed systems. It is a first step towards having a programming language with support for formal models. Show less
The remainder of this thesis is organized as follows. Chapters 2 and 3 introduce the specification formalisms that are used in this thesis. In Chapter 2 we present the computation language. We show... Show moreThe remainder of this thesis is organized as follows. Chapters 2 and 3 introduce the specification formalisms that are used in this thesis. In Chapter 2 we present the computation language. We show that it facilitates the description of specifications that are not partial to a particular mode of execution. Furthermore, we present a semantics and a logic for reasoning about correctness of programs. In Chapter 3 we present the coordination language. We define its semantics and show how it connects to the computation language. In Chapters 4 and 5 we develop a theory of refinement. This theory provides a number of proof techniques that enable us to incrementally refine the behavioural aspects of a program. These chapters form the most theoretical part of this thesis. It should be possible to get an understanding of the methods derived in these chapters without going through all these proofs. In Chapter 7 we illustrate the method of design by considering some case studies. Comparisons with related work and conclusions are described in Chapters 8 and 9. Show less
