Graphical design of distributed applications through reusable components

The Tracs graphical programming environment promotes a modular approach to the development of distributed applications. A few types of reusable design components make the environment both simple and powerful. Tracs exploits modularity in an original way. Its support of message models, task models, and architecture models as basic design components provides programmers with a framework that has proven practical, powerful, and easy to understand. Furthermore, modularity has allowed us to add advanced facilities to the environment, with little implementation and integration effort. From this point of view, our choice of supporting message models as a basic design component has proven appropriate. Several of the ideas explored in Tracs will be useful in future work on programming environments for parallel and distributed systems