A gentle introduction to S-NET : Typed stream processing and declarative coordination of asynchronous components

Abstract

We present the design of S-NET, a coordination language and component technology based on stream processing. S-NET achieves a near-complete separation between application code, written in a conventional programming language, and coordination code, written in S-NET itself. S-NET boxes integrate existing sequential code as stream-processing components into streaming networks, whose construction is based on algebraic formulae built out of four network combinators. Subtyping on the level of boxes and networks and a tailor-made inheritance mechanism achieve flexible software reuse.