Abstract
The goal of the Demaq project is to investigate a novel way of thinking about distributed applications that are based on the asynchronous exchange of XML messages. Unlike today's solutions that rely on imperative programming languages and multi-tiered application servers, Demaq uses a declarative language for implementing the application logic as a set of rules. A rule compiler transforms the application specifications into execution plans against the message history, which are evaluated using our optimized runtime engine. This allows us to leverage existing knowledge about declarative query processing for optimizing distributed applications.