Abstract: Programming environments for the development of distributed applications are called to face issues such as the configuration of the interconnection system, the coordination of heterogeneous application constituents, etc. Aster is a configuration-based system which deals with those issues and allows the programmer to guide the customization of the runtime environment so as to meet the application needs. In this paper we show that our system conforms with \tina's computing architecture and we demonstrate its capabilities on formal reasoning about functional and nonfunctional application requirements. An example of trading both within the same runtime environment and between heterogeneous ones is given. In this example we demonstrate the automatic customization capabilities of Aster and we illustrate a unified way for dealing with the issues of software heterogeneity, software reuse, and interoperability.

Keywords: Configuration-based programming, Customization, Distributed processing environment, Interoperability, Trading.