The client must preorder relates tests (clients) instead of processes (servers). The existing characterisation of this preorder is unsatisfactory for it relies on the notion of usable clients which, in turn, are defined using an existential quantification over the servers that ensure client satisfaction. In this paper we characterise the set of usable clients for finite-branching LTSs, and give a sound and complete decision procedure for it. We also provide a novel coinductive characterisation of the client preorder, which we use to argue that the preorder is decidable, thus positively answering the question opened in [3,6].

To achieve scalability, modern Internet services often rely on distributed databases with consistency models for transactions weaker than serializability. At present, application programmers often lack techniques to ensure that the weakness of these consistency models does not violate application correctness. We present criteria to check whether applications that rely on a database providing only weak consistency are robust, i.e., behave as if they used a database providing serializability. When this is the case, the application programmer can reap the scalability benefits of weak consistency while being able to easily check the desired correctness properties. Our results handle systematically and uniformly several recently proposed weak consistency models, as well as a mechanism for strengthening consistency in parts of an application.

Modern distributed systems often rely on databases that achieve scalability by providing only weak guarantees about the consistency of distributed transaction processing. The semantics of programs interacting with such a database depends on its consistency model, defining these guarantees. Unfortunately, consistency models are usually stated informally or using disparate formalisms, often tied to the database internals. To deal with this problem, we propose a framework for specifying a variety of consistency models for transactions uniformly and declaratively. Our specifications are given in the style of weak memory models, using structures of events and relations on them. The specifications are particularly concise because they exploit the property of atomic visibility guaranteed by many consistency models: either all or none of the updates by a transaction can be visible to another one. This allows the specifications to abstract from individual events inside transactions. We illustrate the use of our framework by specifying several existing consistency models. To validate our specifications, we prove that they are equivalent to alternative operational ones, given as algorithms closer to actual implementations. Our work provides a rigorous foundation for developing the metatheory of the novel form of concurrency arising in weakly consistent large-scale databases.

Contracts play an essential role in the Service Oriented Computing, for which they need to be equipped with a sub-contract relation. We compare two possible formulations, one based on compliance and the other on the testing theory of De Nicola and Hennessy. We show that if the language of contracts is sufficiently expressive then the resulting sub-contract relations are incomparable. However if we put natural restrictions on the contract language then the sub-contract relations coincide, at least when applied to servers. But when formulated for clients they remain incomparable, for many reasonable contract languages. Finally we give one example of a contract language for which the client-based sub-contract relations coincide.

Session types are a type formalism used to describe communication protocols over private session channels. Each participant in a binary session owns one endpoint of a session channel. A key notion is that of duality: the endpoints of a session channel should have dual session types in order to guarantee communication safety. Duality relations have been independently defined in different ways and different works, without considering their effect on the type system. In this paper we systematically study the existing duality relations and some new ones, and compare them in order to understand their expressiveness. The outcome is that those relations are split into two groups, one related to the naïve inductive duality, and the other related to a notion of mutual compliance, which we borrow from the literature on contracts for web-services.

In the standard testing theory of DeNicola-Hennessy one process is considered to be a refinement of another if every test guaranteed by the former is also guaranteed by the latter. In the domain of web services this has been recast, with processes viewed as servers and tests as clients. In this way the standard refinement preorder between servers is determined by their ability to satisfy clients.But in this setting there is also a natural refinement preorder between clients, determined by their ability to be satisfied by servers. In more general settings where there is no distinction between clients and servers, but all processes are peers, there is a further refinement preorder based on the mutual satisfaction of peers.We give a uniform account of these three preorders. In particular we give two characterisations. The first is behavioural, in terms of traces and ready sets. The second, for finite processes, is equational.

Service oriented architectures draw heavily on techniques for reusing and assembling off-the-shelf software components. While powerful, this programming practice is not without a cost: the software architect must ensure that the off-the-shelf components interact safely and in ways that conform with the specification. We develop a new theory for adaptable service composition. The theory provides an effective framework for analyzing the conformance of contract-based service compositions, and for enforcing their compliance, in a uniform, formally elegant setting.

Session types are used to describe and structure interactions between independent processes in distributed systems. Higher-order types are needed in order to properly structure delegation of responsibility between processes. In this paper we show that higher-order web-service contracts can be used to provide a fully-abstract model of recursive higher-order session types. The model is set-theoretic, in the sense that the meaning of a contract is given in terms of the set of contracts with which it complies. The proof of full-abstraction depends on a novel notion of the complement of a contract. This in turn gives rise to an alternative to the type duality commonly used in systems for type-checking session types. We believe that the notion of complement captures more faithfully the behavioural intuition underlying type duality.