A Survey of Linguistic Structures for Application-level Fault-Tolerance

The structures for the expression of fault-tolerance provisions into the application software are the central topic of this paper. Structuring techniques answer the questions "How to incorporate fault-tolerance in the application layer of a computer program" and "How to manage the fault-tolerant code". As such, they provide means to control complexity, the latter being a relevant factor for the introduction of design faults. This fact and the ever increasing complexity of today's distributed software justify the need for simple, coherent, and effective structures for the expression of fault-tolerance in the application software. In this text we first define a "base" of structural attributes with which application-level fault-tolerance structures can be qualitatively assessed and compared with each other and with respect to the above mentioned needs. This result is then used to provide an elaborated survey of the state-of-the-art of application-level fault-tolerance structures.