Towards a programming model for context-aware applications

In mobile computing scenarios, users move in different environments and applications can automatically explore their surroundings. This type of context-aware application is an emerging trend, so far not widely disseminated. We believe that the proposal of a programming model specifically designed for the specification of context-aware applications, using general abstractions, will foster a rapidly widespread of such kind of software. In this article, we propose the use of the Holoparadigm (in short Holo) to fill this gap. We created a programming language based on Holo (called HoloL) to demonstrate the strengths of Holoparadigm to develop context-aware applications. The article uses a sample scenario to show the Holo's practical aspects related to implementation of context-aware applications. We also present a platform to HoloL (called HoloEnv), composed of a compiler, a virtual machine, and a distributed execution environment. Finally, different performance aspects of the HoloEnv's components were evaluated through experimental results.     

Facilitating the development of cross-platform software via automated code synthesis from web-based programming resources

When a mobile application is supported on multiple major platforms, its market penetration is maximized. Such cross-platform native applications essentially deliver the same core functionality, albeit within the conventions of each supported platform. Maintaining and evolving a cross-platform native application is tedious and error-prone, as each modification requires replicating the changes for each of the application׳s platform-specific variants. Syntax-directed source-to-source translation proves inadequate to alleviate the problem, as native API access is always domain-specific.In this paper, we present a novel approach—Native-2-Native—that uses program transformations performed on one platform to automatically synthesize equivalent code blocks to be used on another platform. When a programmer modifies the source version of an application, the changes are captured. Based on the changes, Native-2-Native identifies the semantic content of the source code block and formulates an appropriate query to search for the equivalent target code block using popular web-based programming resources. The discovered target code block is then presented to the programmer as an automatically synthesized target language source file for further fine-tuning and subsequent integration into the mobile application׳s target version. We evaluate the proposed method using common native resources, such as sensors, network access, and canonical data structures. We show that our approach can correctly synthesize more than 74% of iOS code from the provided Android source code and 91% of Android code from the provided iOS source code. The presented approach effectively automates the process of extracting the source code block׳s semantics and discovering existing target examples with the equivalent functionality, thus alleviating some of the most laborious and intellectually tiresome programming tasks in modern mobile development.     

Enhancing Routing Robustness of Unstructured Peer-to-Peer Networks Using Mobile Agents

The growing popularity of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technology in real applications in recent years has sparked increasing interest from both academia and industry in designing resilient P2P networks for these applications. Routing is a crucial technique to support successful P2P applications, and designing robust routing mechanisms is still a technical challenge for P2P systems and applications due to their inherent dynamics. This paper addresses the issue of resilient routing in unstructured P2P networks. To this end, we first propose a novel query routing approach to improving query performance in unstructured P2P networks, and then develop a mobile agent based network reconfiguration mechanism that provides a combined node and link failure diagnosis and restoration to maintain routing performance even in dynamic network environments. Simulated results show that the proposed query routing approach can achieve a good tradeoff between query hit rates and space costs in scale-free networks and that the mobile agent based network reconfiguration mechanism outperforms the existing methods in different types of network topologies.     

Bringing Scheme programming to the iPhone—Experience

The iPhone SDK provides a powerful platform for the development of applications that make use of iPhone capabilities, such as sensors, GPS, Wi‐Fi, or Bluetooth connectivity. We observe that so far the development of iPhone applications has mostly been restricted to using Objective‐C. However, developing applications in plain Objective‐C on the iPhone OS suffers from limitations, such as the need for explicit memory management and lack of syntactic extension mechanism. Moreover, when developing distributed applications in Objective‐C, programmers have to manually deal with distribution concerns, such as service discovery, remote communication, and failure handling. In this paper, we discuss our experience in porting the Scheme programming language to the iPhone OS and how it can be used together with Objective‐C to develop iPhone applications. To support the interaction between Scheme programs and the underlying iPhone APIs, we have implemented a language symbiosis layer that enables programmers to access the iPhone SDK libraries from Scheme. In addition, we have designed high‐level distribution constructs to ease the development of distributed iPhone applications in an event‐driven style. We validate and discuss these constructs with a series of examples, including an iPod controller, a maps application, and a distributed multiplayer Scrabble‐like game. We discuss the lessons learned from this experience for other programming language ports to mobile platforms. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Linguistic symbiosis between event loop actors and threads

In modern programming languages, concurrency control can be traced back to one of two different schools: actor-based message passing concurrency and thread-based shared-state concurrency. This paper describes a linguistic symbiosis between two programming languages with such different concurrency models. More specifically, we describe a novel symbiosis between actors represented as event loops on the one hand and threads on the other. This symbiosis ensures that the invariants of the actor-based concurrency model are not violated by engaging in symbiosis with multithreaded programs. The proposed mapping is validated by means of a concrete symbiosis between AmbientTalk, a flexible, domain-specific language for writing distributed programs and Java, a conventional object-oriented language. This symbiosis allows the domain-specific language to reuse existing software components written in a multithreaded language without sacrificing the beneficial event-driven properties of the actor concurrency model.     

Improving Resource Management in Distributed Systems using Language-Level Structuring Concepts

Currently, a shift of paradigm from sequential to distributed computing can be observed. Tremendous efforts are needed to cope with the challenging demands that are inherent to this transition. The two most important issues concern programming support for developing large-scale distributed applications and the efficient execution of such applications on top of a distributed hardware configuration. This paper presents a new language and object-based approach called MoDiS to cope with these demands. Distributed systems are developed and transformed into executables following a systematic, top-down driven method. Language-level is intended to mean that a high-level programming language is used to develop operating system services as well as user-level applications. The language-level concepts employed are based on objects and support advanced structuring features. Structural dependencies between objects are implicitly determined at the application level and exploited by the distributed resource management system to transform applications into efficient executables.     

Formulae Meet Programs Over the Net: A Framework for Correct Network Aware Programming

A general framework for network aware programming is presented that consists of a language for programming mobile applications, a logic for specifying properties of the applications and an automatic tool for verifying such properties. The framework is based on X-KLAIM, eXtended KLAIM, an experimental programming language specifically designed to program distributed systems composed of several components interacting through multiple tuple spaces and mobile code. The proposed logic is a modal logic inspired by Hennessy-Milner logic and is interpreted over the same labelled structures used for the operational semantics of X-KLAIM. The automatic verification tool is based on a complete proof system that has been previously developed for the logic.     

On Migrating Threads

Based on the notion of persistent threads in Tycoon (Matthes and Schmidt, 1994), we investigate thread migration as a programming construct for building activity-oriented distributed applications. We first show how a straight-forward extension of a higher-order persistent language can be used to define activities that span multiple (semi-) autonomous nodes in heterogeneous networks. In particular, we discuss the intricate binding issues that arise in systems where threads are first-class language citizens that may access local and remote, mobile and immobile resources.We also describe how our system model can be understood as a promising generalization of the more static architecture of first-order and higher-order distributed object systems. Finally, we give some insight into the implementation of persistent and migrating threads and we explain how to represent bindings to ubiquitous resources present at each node visited by a migrating thread on the network to avoid excessive communication or storage costs.     

Implementing design patterns as parametric aspects using ParaAJ: The case of the singleton,observer, and decorator design patterns

Implementation of a design pattern can take many forms according to the programming language being used. Most of the literature presents design patterns in their conventional object-oriented implementations. Several other studies show the implementation in aspect-oriented languages such as AspectJ, EOS, and Caesar. In this work, we compare the implementation of three design patterns: singleton, observer, and decorator design patterns in these languages and also discuss the possibility of implementing them in ParaAJ: an extension to the AspectJ language that implements the idea of parametric aspects. We found that ParaAJ helps in making the implementation of the singleton and observer patterns reusable but it fails to help in the decorator case. The problem with the decorator pattern exists because of the current translation mechanism of ParaAJ׳s aspects to normal AspectJ׳s aspects. This opens the door for further work in ParaAJ to better support the idea of parametric aspects.     

Protecting mobile code in the world

Proposed applications for mobile code systems include autonomous shopping agents, autonomic systems, distributed sensor network applications, and interstellar space networks. I argue the case for mobile code systems as the next-generation distributed programming paradigm and discuss the security problems that must be addressed before this vision is practically realizable. The security discussion will focus on protecting mobile code programs that execute in the wild from malicious actions by remote hosts.     

Distributed programming with Logic Tuple Spaces

From the point of view of distributed programming one of the most interesting communication mechanisms is associative tuple matching in a shared dataspace, as exemplified in the Linda coordination language. Linda has been used as a coordination layer to parallelize several sequential programming languages, such as C and Scheme. In this paper we study the combination of Linda with a logic language, whose result is the language Extended Shared Prolog (ESP). We show that ESP is based on a new programming model called PoliS, that extends Linda with Multiple Tuple Spaces. A class of applications for ESP is discussed, introducing the concept of “open multiple tuple spaces”. Finally, we show how the distributed implementation of ESP uses the network version of Linda’s tuple space.     

Java安全机制下移动Agent系统的安全性问题

移动Agent作为分布式网络计算的一种新形式,可以降低网络传输量,异步地完成任务。但在复杂的网络环境下,移动Agent对安全性提出了特殊的要求。文中先大致介绍了移动Agent所带来的安全隐患,然后深入地研究了Java语言的安全机制,最后给出了一个安全模型的参考实现,并讨论如何结合Java的安全模型来解决移动Agent的安全性问题。虽然Java的安全模型本身存在一些不完善的地方,但随着其进一步改进,安全模型参考实现也将为移动Agent的应用提供更有力的保障。     

Dispatching mobile Agents for DDM applicationss

Techniques for mining information from distributed data sources accessible over the Internet are a growing area of research. The mobile Agent paradigm opens a new door for distributed data mining and knowledge discovery applications. In this paper we present the design of a mobile agent system which couples service discovery, using a logical language based application programming interface, and database access. Combining mobility with database access provides a means to create more efficient data mining applications. The processing of data is moved to network wide data locations instead of the traditional approach of bringing huge amount of data to the processing location. Our proposal aims at implementing system tools that will enable intelligent mobile Agents to roam the Internet searching for distributed data services. Agents access the data, discover patterns, extract useful information from facts recorded in the databases, then communicate local results back to the user. The user then generates a global data model through the aggregation of results provided by all Agents. This overcomes barriers posed by network congestion, poor security, and unreliability.     

Formalising Java RMI with explicit code mobility

This paper presents an object-oriented, Java-like core language with primitives for distributed programming and explicit code mobility. We apply our formulation to prove the correctness of several optimisations for distributed programs. Our language captures crucial but often hidden aspects of distributed object-oriented programming, including object serialisation, dynamic class downloading and remote method invocation. It is defined in terms of an operational semantics that concisely models the behaviour of distributed programs using machinery from calculi of mobile processes. Type safety is established using invariant properties for distributed runtime configurations. We argue that primitives for explicit code mobility offer a programmer fine-grained control of type-safe code distribution, which is crucial for improving the performance and safety of distributed object-oriented applications.     

Mirror‐based reflection in AmbientTalk

This paper introduces a novel mechanism to perform intercession (a form of reflection) in an object‐oriented programming language with the goal of making the language extensible from within itself. The proposed mechanism builds upon a mirror‐based architecture, leading to a reusable reflective application programming interface that cleanly separates interface from implementation details. However, support for intercession has been limited in contemporary mirror‐based architectures. This is due to the fact that mirror‐based architectures only support reflection explicitly triggered by metaprograms, while intercession requires reflection implicitly triggered by the language interpreter. This work reconciles mirrors with intercession in the context of an actor‐based, object‐oriented programming language named AmbientTalk. We describe this language's full reflective architecture, highlighting its novel mirror‐based approach to reflect upon both objects and concurrently executing actors. Subsequently, we apply AmbientTalk's mirror‐based reflection to implement two language features, which crucially depend on intercession, to wit future‐type message passing and leased object references. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Building resilient low-diameter peer-to-peer topologies

As more applications rely on underlying peer-to-peer topologies, the need for efficient and resilient infrastructure has become more pressing. A number of important classes of topologies have emerged over the last several years, all with various strengths and weaknesses. For example, the popular structured peer-to-peer topologies based on distributed hash tables (DHTs) offer applications assured performance, but are not resilient to attacks and major disruptions that are likely in the overlay. In contrast, unstructured topologies where nodes create random connections among themselves on-the-fly, are resilient to attacks but can not offer performance assurances because they often create overlays with large diameters, making some nodes practically unreachable. We propose Phenix, a peer-to-peer algorithm for building resilient low-diameter peer-to-peer topologies that can resist different types of organized and targeted malicious behavior. Phenix leverages the strengths of these existing approaches without inheriting their weaknesses and is capable of building topologies of nodes that follow a power-law while being fully distributed requiring no central server, thus, eliminating the possibility of a single point of failure in the system. We present the design and evaluation of the algorithm and show through extensive analysis, simulation, and experimental results obtained from an implementation on the PlanetLab testbed that Phenix is robust to network dynamics such as bootstrapping mechanisms, joins/leaves, node failure and large-scale network attacks, while maintaining low overhead when implemented in an experimental network.     

Promondia: a Java-based framework for real-time group communication in the Web

The World Wide Web has evolved from a distributed hypertext system to a platform-independent graphical user interface that integrates many network services. So far, its technology has restricted it mainly to applications for information retrieval.As networks become ubiquitious and more and more users have a permanent connection, there is an increasing demand for other network services, such as real-time data feeds, group communication, and teleconferencing. So far, these services have been provided by various proprietary software systems, which were hard to set up and use, and thus not very successful.Integrating real-time group communication services into the World Wide Web is a natural way to make them more accessible and will take the Web a step further on its way to becoming the universal network application.In this paper, we describe functionalities required for these services and present an implementation based on Sun Microsystem's Java² programming language. We focus on the high-level functionalities and abstractions, but also describe an object-oriented programming model for group communication systems.