The Lightweight Flow Engine: A Model for Rapid Development and Emulation of Telecommunication Services

The implementation and development of applications and services can be significantly simplified and improved through the use of domain specific languages or formalisms. Domain specific languages provide primitives that correspond to the most important computational elements around which the particular class of applications of interest are typically structured. The domain specific language should be designed to enable a programming paradigm that closely mirrors the style in which the target applications are designed or described. This thesis describes a system called the Lightweight Flow Engine (LiFE), which is comprised of a language and a run-time environment designed to enable programmers to rapidly create complex telecommunications services.