Ambient-Oriented Programming in Fractal

International audienceAmbient-Oriented Programming (AmOP) comprises suits of challenges that are hard to meet by current software development techniques. Although Component-Oriented Programming (COP) represents promising approach, the state-of-the-art component models do not provide sufficient adaptability towards specific constraints of the Ambient field. In this position paper we argue that merging AmOP and COP can be achieved by introducing the Fractal component model and its new feature : Component-Based Controlling Membranes. The proposed solution allows dynamical adaptation of component systems towards the challenges of the Ambient world

Ambient-Oriented Programming in Fractal

International audienceAmbient-Oriented Programming (AmOP) comprises suits of challenges that are hard to meet by current software development techniques. Although Component-Oriented Programming (COP) represents promising approach, the state-of-the-art component models do not provide sufficient adaptability towards specific constraints of the Ambient field. In this position paper we argue that merging AmOP and COP can be achieved by introducing the Fractal component model and its new feature : Component-Based Controlling Membranes. The proposed solution allows dynamical adaptation of component systems towards the challenges of the Ambient world

NOW: Orchestrating services in a nomadic network using a dedicated workflow language

AbstractOrchestrating services in nomadic or mobile ad hoc networks is not without a challenge, since these environments are built upon volatile connections. Services residing on mobile devices are exposed to (temporary) network failures, which must be considered the rule rather than the exception. This paper proposes a dedicated workflow language built on top of an ambient-oriented programming language that supports dynamic service discovery and communication primitives resilient to network failures. The proposed workflow language, NOW, has support for high level workflow abstractions for control flow, rich network and service failure detection, and failure handling through compensating actions, and dynamic data flow between the services in the environment. By adding this extra layer of abstraction, the application programmer is offered a flexible way to develop applications for nomadic networks

Language Abstractions for RFID Technology

Developing pervasive and context-aware applications that make use of RFID technology is a daunting task given the high degree of failures inherent to communication with RFID tags. The reason is that current programming models do not incorporate these failures into the very heart of their computational model. AmbientTalk, a research language aimed at pervasive applications running in mobile ad hoc networks, does offer such a programming model, but it is aimed at mobile devices interconnected via peer-to-peer network connections such as WiFi or Bluetooth. In this paper we show how we use this programming model for the communication with RFID tags

Object Technology for Ambient Intelligence : Workshop Reader for OT4Aml at ECOOP 2007

This reader comprises the submissions to the third workshop on object-technology for Ambient Intelligence and Pervasive Computing held at ECOOP 2007

Using Radio Frequency Identification Technology In Healthcare

In the healthcare industry, medical treatment can be a matter of life and death, so that any mistakes may cause irreversible consequences. As hospitals have sought to reduce these types of errors, Radio Frequency Identification Technology (RFID) has become a solution in the healthcare industry to address these problems. Since 2005, RFID has generated a lot of interest in healthcare to make simpler the identification process for tracking and managing medical resources to improve their use and to reduce the need for future costs for purchasing duplicate equipment. There are rising concerns linked to the privacy and security issues, when RFID tags are used for tracking items carried by people. A tag by its design will respond to a reader\u27s query without the owner\u27s consent and without the owner even noticing it. When RFID tags contain patients\u27 personal data and medical history, they have to be protected to avoid any leaking of privacy-sensitive information. To address these concerns, we propose an Intelligent RFID System which is a RFID card system that embeds smart tags in insurance cards, medical charts, and medical bracelets to store medical information. Patient data is sent to the insurance providers by way of a clearinghouse that translates the information from the healthcare facility into a format that the insurance company can process. To ensure data protection, an additional security layer was added to secure the communication between the tags and the readers. This security layer will allow only authorized readers to poll tags for the patient\u27s medical tags and prevent unauthorized access to tag data. It will simplify the maintenance and transfer of patient data in a secure, feasible and cost effective way

A Type-Safe Model of Adaptive Object Groups

Services are autonomous, self-describing, technology-neutral software units that can be described, published, discovered, and composed into software applications at runtime. Designing software services and composing services in order to form applications or composite services requires abstractions beyond those found in typical object-oriented programming languages. This paper explores service-oriented abstractions such as service adaptation, discovery, and querying in an object-oriented setting. We develop a formal model of adaptive object-oriented groups which offer services to their environment. These groups fit directly into the object-oriented paradigm in the sense that they can be dynamically created, they have an identity, and they can receive method calls. In contrast to objects, groups are not used for structuring code. A group exports its services through interfaces and relies on objects to implement these services. Objects may join or leave different groups. Groups may dynamically export new interfaces, they support service discovery, and they can be queried at runtime for the interfaces they support. We define an operational semantics and a static type system for this model of adaptive object groups, and show that well-typed programs do not cause method-not-understood errors at runtime.Comment: In Proceedings FOCLASA 2012, arXiv:1208.432

A Study of Concurrency Bugs and Advanced Development Support for Actor-based Programs

The actor model is an attractive foundation for developing concurrent applications because actors are isolated concurrent entities that communicate through asynchronous messages and do not share state. Thereby, they avoid concurrency bugs such as data races, but are not immune to concurrency bugs in general. This study taxonomizes concurrency bugs in actor-based programs reported in literature. Furthermore, it analyzes the bugs to identify the patterns causing them as well as their observable behavior. Based on this taxonomy, we further analyze the literature and find that current approaches to static analysis and testing focus on communication deadlocks and message protocol violations. However, they do not provide solutions to identify livelocks and behavioral deadlocks. The insights obtained in this study can be used to improve debugging support for actor-based programs with new debugging techniques to identify the root cause of complex concurrency bugs.Comment: - Submitted for review - Removed section 6 "Research Roadmap for Debuggers", its content was summarized in the Future Work section - Added references for section 1, section 3, section 4.3 and section 5.1 - Updated citation

Capsule-oriented programming

Explicit concurrency should be abolished from all higher-level programming languages (i.e. everything except - perhaps- plain machine code.). Dijkstra [1] (paraphrased). A promising class of concurrency abstractions replaces explicit concurrency mechanisms with a single linguistic mechanism that combines state and control and uses asynchronous messages for communications, e.g. active objects or actors, but that doesn\u27t remove the hurdle of understanding non-local control transfer. What if the programming model enabled programmers to simply do what they do best, that is, to describe a system in terms of its modular structure and write sequential code to implement the operations of those modules and handles details of concurrency? In a recently sponsored NSF project we are developing such a model that we call capsule-oriented programming and its realization in the Panini project. This model favors modularity over explicit concurrency, encourages concurrency correctness by construction, and exploits modular structure of programs to expose implicit concurrency

An Efficient Failure Recovery Scheme for Service Composition in Pervasive Computing

During the execution of service composition, if one component service fails, a failure recovery mechanism is needed to ensure that the running process is not interrupted and the failed service can be replaced quickly and efficiently. In this paper, we propose an efficient failure recovery scheme for rapid reconstruction of services compositions. Sufficient conditions about substitution and keeping state-consistent between services are proposed. Further, the algorithm for keeping state-consistent between services is proposed. The innovation of this paper is that the failure service will be substituted and the failure service’ state will be transformed into the substituting service’ state to improve the performance of the failure recovery scheme. And the prototype system is implemented. Simulation experiments demonstrate the good performance of the proposed failure recovery scheme