Software systems can be conveniently described, constructed and managed in terms of their configuration, where configuration is the system structure defined as the set of constituent software components together with their interconnections. A specification of the system configuration can be used both to describe the required system structure and to generate the actual system itself. The performance of these tasks at the configuration level is termed configuration programming, and is best supported by the use of a declarative configuration language and associated support tools. This paper discusses the main principles of this approach and illustrates its practice by describing the support which has been provided in the Conic environment for distributed systems. These concepts are illustrated by using a simple example: a patient monitoring system (PMS).

Inspec keywords: programming environments; medical computing; distributed processing; medical administrative data processing; formal specification

Other keywords: distributed systems; software specification; declarative configuration language; system configuration; Conic environment; configuration programming; system description; patient monitoring system

Subjects: Software engineering techniques; Medical administration; Programming support; Biology and medical computing