The Event Coordination Notation: Execution Engine and Programming Framework

ECNO (Event Coordination Notation) is a notation for modelling the behaviour of a software system on top of some object-oriented data model. ECNO has two main objectives: On the one hand, ECNO should allow modelling the behaviour of a system on the domain level; on the other hand, it should be possible to completely generate code from ECNO and the underlying object-oriented domain models. Today, there are several approaches that would allow to do this. But, most of them would require that the data models and the behaviour models are using the same technology and the code is generated together. By contrast, ECNO can be used for modelling the behaviour on top of any object-oriented model - or even on top of manually written object-oriented code. This way, it is easy to integrate ECNO models with other technologies, to use ECNO on top of code generated by other technologies or with code that was written manually. In this paper, we rephrase the main concepts of ECNO. The focus of this paper, however, is on the architecture of the ECNO execution engine and its programming framework. We will show how this framework allows us to integrate ECNO with object-oriented models, how it works without any explicit control, and how it easily integrates with traditional programming.