Orc - An Orchestration Language

Orc is a programming language and system for orchestrating distributed services. The Orc model assumes that basic services, like sequential computation and data manipulation, are implemented by primitive sites. Orc provides constructs to orchestrate the concurrent invocation of sites to achieve a goal – while managing time-outs, priorities, and failure of sites or communication.

Jayadev Misra
William R. Cook

SourceForge.net Project

Orc project on SourceForge.net

Papers about Orc

• Simulation using Orchestration (Extended Abstract)
  David Kitchin, Evan Powell, and Jayadev Misra
  
• A Timed Semantics of Orc
  Ian Wehrman, David Kitchin, William R. Cook. Jayadev Misra
  (updated 11/2007)
• Properties of the Timed Operational and Denotational Semantics of Orc
  Ian Wehrman, David Kitchin, William R. Cook. Jayadev Misra
  Technical Report TR-07-65, University of Texas at Austin, Department of Computer Sciences, 2007
• Orc-X: Combining Orchestrations and XQuery
  Kristi Morton, David Kitchin, William Cook
  The University of Texas at Austin, Department of Computer Sciences, December 2007, Report# TR-07-63.
• A Language for Task Orchestration and its Semantic Properties (2up for printing)
  David Kitchin, William R. Cook and Jayadev Misra
  Proc. of the International Conference on Concurrency Theory (CONCUR), 2006.
  August 27-30, Bonn, Germany.
  Extended version: UTCS Technical Rerport TR-06-32
• Web Services versus Distributed Objects: A Case Study of Performance and Interface Design
  William R. Cook, Janel Barfield
  Proc. of the IEEE International Conference on Web Services ( ICWS) 2006.
  September 18-22, Chicago, USA
• Workflow Patterns in Orc (2up for printing)
  William R. Cook, Sourabh Patwardhan, and Jayadev Misra
  Proc. of the International Conference on Coordination Models and Languages (COORDINATION), 2006.
  (slides from talk)
• Computation Orchestration: A Basis for Wide-Area Computing (DOI)
  Jayadev Misra and William R. Cook
  Journal of Software and Systems Modeling, May 2006.
• Implementation Outline of Orc
  William R. Cook and Jayadev Misra
• A Tree Semantics of an Orchestration Language
  Jayadev Misra, Tony Hoare and Galen Menzel
  Lecture Notes for NATO summer school, Marktoberdorf, August 2004

Installing and Using the Orc Language

• Orc 05. User Guide
• Download: orcDist.zip
  • To install, simply unpack into any directory and run
    orc <filename>
  • See the User Guide for details

Source Code and Design of the Orc Implementation

• The high-level design of the Orc implementation is given in Implementation Outline of Orc
• Code documentation: javadoc
• Source files: orcSrc.zip
  • Requires Eclipse 3.1 with support for Java Generics to build.
  • This zip file contains an Eclipse package for building Orc
  • Note that the Src distribution contains everything in the execution-only distribution mentioned above.