Linguagem e compilador para o paradigma orientado a notificações (PON): avanços e comparações

Abstract

The current software development paradigms, specifically the Imperative Paradigm (IP) and the Declarative Paradigm (DP), have weaknesses that affect the applications performance and decoupling (or minimal coupling) between the software modules. In order to provide a solution regarding these weaknesses, the Notification Oriented Paradigm (NOP) was developed. NOP is inspired by the concepts of the IP (e.g. objects) and DP (e.g. base of facts and Rules). Basically, NOP uses objects to deal with facts and Rules as compositions of other, smaller, objects. These objects have the following behavioral characteristics: autonomy, independence, responsiveness and collaboration through notifications. Thus, it’s highlighted that the realization of these concepts was firstly instantiated through a Framework developed in C++. Such NOP materialization has been used as an alternative for Application development in the domain of this paradigm and made possible, in fact, the creation of applications for typical computing environments based on Von Neumann architecture. The development of the C++ materialization of NOP has not presented satisfactory results in terms of performance as it should when taking into account its asymptotic calculation and programming facility. In this context, this work presents an evolution of NOP by creating a specific programming language, and its respective compiler, for this paradigm. Therefore, this work presents the language definition and the details of the development of its compiler. To evaluate the evolution regarding to performance (e.g. processing time) and programming facility, some comparative studies using the NOP language and compiler are presented. These comparative studies were performed by developing two software applications called Target and Sales Application. These applications have been developed based on NOP language, and the experiments were performed simulating sequences of execution in order to evaluate the processing time for the generated results by NOP compiler. Still, these experiments allowed the evaluation of NOP programming language, in a subjective way, regarding to ease programming. Thus, with such comparative studies, it was possible to observe that the results presented by the compiler NOP were satisfactory when compared to the results achieved via Framework and for equivalent applications developed based on the Oriented Object Paradigm (OOP).