Fachliches Gutachten zur Diplomarbeit "Explicit Connectors
for Coordination of Active Objects" von Manuel Günter.

The trend to interconnect software systems increased the pressure on
object oriented programming languages to include concurrency control
features. However high-level coordination abstractions like
multi-object constraints and transactions are not natively supported
in most of these approaches.  There, such coordination tasks must be
hand-crafted which is painful and error-prone even for an
expert programmer. Furthermore benefits of
object-oriented programming such as separation of concerns
reuseability maintainability are lost.

Mr. Günter proposes the FLO/c model which transparently adds
multi-object coordination features to an object model. The FLO/c model
is an extension of the purely sequential model proposed by
Dr. S. Ducasse.  It clearly separates connectors from domain specific
components.  The connectors implement the interactions between the
components and provides coordination facilities. The connectors are
first-class objects, therefore they can be manipulated at run-time.
Thus FLO/c is more flexible than other coordination approaches using
static declarations. With as few as five different type of rules,
connectors can implement high-level coordination
abstractions. Connectors collaborate by composing their rules
according to a simple schema thus allowing incremental development of
a coordinated system.

Part I of the thesis presents the FLO/c model from an object-oriented
point of view

Part II of the thesis formally specifies the kind of coordination
abstractions FLO/c supports. The specification allows the reasoning
about FLO/c programs. Mr. Günter proves properties of the different
types of FLO/c as well as the FLO/c model's benevolent liveness
properties (e.g. deadlock freedom).

Part III of the thesis presents the implementation work.  In order to
evaluate the FLO/c model Mr. Günter implemented it on top of Smalltalk
using meta-level programming. Furthermore he demonstrated the use and
the power of the model by implementing eleven coordination examples
taken from recent and traditional coordination literature, or invented
to highlight particular aspects of the model.

Part IV of the thesis compares other approaches in similar areas.
Then Mr. Günter concludes by resuming the achievements of 
the thesis and points out future work.