Diploma Thesis, TU-Vienna, 2014

The Peer Model is a new design approach for distributed software systems. In contrast to other modeling languages it allows to model even complex systems in a very concise and sharp way without being tailored for a specific problem domain. It gains its strengths from a well-defined underlying space based framework, which is able to guarantee several system properties, so that the architect may focus on the actual coordination pattern design. Up to now there has not been a concrete software implementation available which would enable developers to transform Peer Models into executable software components. It has therefore been crucial for the practical use of the Peer Model to provide such an implementation - the PeerSpace.NET framework in hand.

 

Earlier frameworks in the area of space based computing faced criticism in the area of API usability for developers. Denoted as "hard to learn ", it has been set as a major goal to build a framework with high API usability, offering the same comfort to developers as the Peer Model is providing to software architects. Therefore a fluent interface has been created on top of the core framework to support developers in their work. An extensive evaluation using two completely different methods from the area of qualitative and quantitative API usability assessment ensured that the solution indeed fulfills the given requirements.

 

Altogether, the PeerSpace.NET framework allows developers to build scalable distributed software components based on the new Peer Model approach in a convenient and error-preventive way.