RAFDA: A Policy-Aware Middleware Supporting the Flexible Separation of Application Logic from Distribution

Middleware technologies often limit the way in which object classes may be used in distributed applications due to the fixed distribution policies that they impose. These policies permeate applications developed using existing middleware systems and force an unnatural encoding of application level semantics. For example, the application programmer has no direct control over inter-address-space parameter passing semantics. Semantics are fixed by the distribution topology of the application, which is dictated early in the design cycle. This creates applications that are brittle with respect to changes in distribution. This paper explores technology that provides control over the extent to which inter-address-space communication is exposed to programmers, in order to aid the creation, maintenance and evolution of distributed applications. The described system permits arbitrary objects in an application to be dynamically exposed for remote access, allowing applications to be written without concern for distribution. Programmers can conceal or expose the distributed nature of applications as required, permitting object placement and distribution boundaries to be decided late in the design cycle and even dynamically. Inter-address-space parameter passing semantics may also be decided independently of object implementation and at varying times in the design cycle, again possibly as late as run-time. Furthermore, transmission policy may be defined on a per-class, per-method or per-parameter basis, maximizing plasticity. This flexibility is of utility in the development of new distributed applications, and the creation of management and monitoring infrastructures for existing applications.Comment: Submitted to EuroSys 200

Efficient Late Binding of Dynamic Function Compositions

Adaptive software becomes more and more important as computing is increasingly context-dependent. Runtime adaptability can be achieved by dynamically selecting and applying context-specific code. Role-oriented programming has been proposed as a paradigm to enable runtime adaptive software by design. Roles change the objects’ behavior at runtime and thus allow adapting the software to a given context. However, this increased variability and expressiveness has a direct impact on performance and memory consumption. We found a high overhead in the steady-state performance of executing compositions of adaptations. This paper presents a new approach to use run-time information to construct a dispatch plan that can be executed efficiently by the JVM. The concept of late binding is extended to dynamic function compositions. We evaluated the implementation with a benchmark for role-oriented programming languages leveraging context-dependent role semantics achieving a mean speedup of 2.79× over the regular implementation

Software engineering and middleware: a roadmap (Invited talk)

The construction of a large class of distributed systems can be simplified by leveraging middleware, which is layered between network operating systems and application components. Middleware resolves heterogeneity and facilitates communication and coordination of distributed components. Existing middleware products enable software engineers to build systems that are distributed across a local-area network. State-of-the-art middleware research aims to push this boundary towards Internet-scale distribution, adaptive and reconfigurable middleware and middleware for dependable and wireless systems. The challenge for software engineering research is to devise notations, techniques, methods and tools for distributed system construction that systematically build and exploit the capabilities that middleware deliver

NLSC: Unrestricted Natural Language-based Service Composition through Sentence Embeddings

Current approaches for service composition (assemblies of atomic services) require developers to use: (a) domain-specific semantics to formalize services that restrict the vocabulary for their descriptions, and (b) translation mechanisms for service retrieval to convert unstructured user requests to strongly-typed semantic representations. In our work, we argue that effort to developing service descriptions, request translations, and matching mechanisms could be reduced using unrestricted natural language; allowing both: (1) end-users to intuitively express their needs using natural language, and (2) service developers to develop services without relying on syntactic/semantic description languages. Although there are some natural language-based service composition approaches, they restrict service retrieval to syntactic/semantic matching. With recent developments in Machine learning and Natural Language Processing, we motivate the use of Sentence Embeddings by leveraging richer semantic representations of sentences for service description, matching and retrieval. Experimental results show that service composition development effort may be reduced by more than 44\% while keeping a high precision/recall when matching high-level user requests with low-level service method invocations.Comment: This paper will appear on SCC'19 (IEEE International Conference on Services Computing) on July 1

Helena

Ensemble-based systems are software-intensive systems consisting of large numbers of components which can dynamically form goal-oriented communication groups. The goal of an ensemble is usually achieved through interaction of some components, but the contributing components may simultaneously participate in several collaborations. With standard component-based techniques, such systems can only be described by a complex model specifying all ensembles and participants at the same time. Thus, ensemble-based systems lack a development methodology which particularly addresses the dynamic formation and concurrency of ensembles as well as transparency of participants. This thesis proposes the Helena development methodology. It slices an ensemble-based system in two dimensions: Each kind of ensemble is considered separately. This allows the developer to focus on the relevant parts of the system only and abstract away those parts which are non-essential to the current ensemble. Furthermore, an ensemble itself is not defined solely in terms of participating components, but in terms of roles which components adopt in that ensemble. A role is the logical entity needed to contribute to the ensemble while a component provides the technical functionalities to actually execute a role. By simultaneously adopting several roles, a component can concurrently participate in several ensembles. Helena addresses the particular challenges of ensemble-based systems in the main development phases: The domain of an ensemble-based system is described as an ensemble structure of roles built on top of a component-based platform. Based on the ensemble structure, the goals of ensembles are specified as linear temporal logic formulae. With these goals in mind, the dynamic behavior of the system is designed as a set of role behaviors. To show that the ensemble participants actually achieve the global goals of the ensemble by collaboratively executing the specified behaviors, the Helena model is verified against its goals with the model-checker Spin. For that, we provide a translation of Helena models to Promela, the input language of Spin, which is proven semantically correct for a kernel part of Helena. Finally, we provide the Java framework jHelena which realizes all Helena concepts in Java. By implementing a Helena model with this framework, Helena models can be executed according to the formal Helena semantics. To support all activities of the Helena development methodology, we provide the Helena workbench as a tool for specification and automated verification and code generation. The general applicability of Helena is backed by a case study of a larger software system, the Science Cloud Platform. Helena is able to capture, verify and implement the main characteristics of the system. Looking at Helena from a different angle shows that the Helena idea of roles is also well-suited to realize adaptive systems changing their behavioral modes based on perceptions. We extend the Helena development methodology to adaptive systems and illustrate its applicability at an adaptive robotic search-and-rescue example