Type driven development of concurrent communicating systems

This work was kindly supported by SICSA (the Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance) and EPSRC grant EP/N024222/1 (Type-driven Verification of Communicating Systems).Modern software systems rely on communication, for example mobile applications communicating with a central server, distributed systems coordinating a telecommunications network, or concurrent systems handling events and processes in a desktop application. However, reasoning about concurrent programs is hard, since we must reason about each process and the order in which communication might happen between processes. In this paper, I describe a type-driven approach to implementing communicating concurrent programs, using the dependently typed programming language Idris. I show how the type system can be used to describe resource access protocols (such as controlling access to a file handle) and verify that programs correctly follow those protocols. Finally, I show how to use the type system to reason about the order of communication between concurrent processes, ensuring that each end of a communication channel follows a defined protocol.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

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The growing popularity of mobile platforms is changing the Internet user’s computing experience. Current studies suggest that the traditional ubiquitous computing landscape is shifting towards more enhanced and broader mobile computing platform consists of large number of heterogeneous devices. Smartphones and tablets begin to replace the desktop as the primary means of interacting with IT resources. While mobile devices facilitate in consuming web resources in the form of web services, the growing demand for consuming services on mobile device is introducing a complex ecosystem in the mobile environment. This research addresses the communication challenges involved in mobile distributed networks and proposes an event-driven communication approach for information dissemination. This research investigates different communication techniques such as synchronous and asynchronous polling and long-polling, server-side push as mechanisms between client-server interactions and the latest web technologies namely HTML5 standard WebSocket as communication protocol within a publish/subscribe paradigm. Finally, this research introduces and evaluates a framework that is hybrid of REST and event-based publish/subscribe for operating in the mobile environment