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Dynamic service adaptation
(2006)
Change can be observed in our environment and in the technology we build. While changes in the environment happen continuously and implicitly, our technology has to be kept in sync with the changing world around it. Although we can prepare for some of the changes for most of them we cannot. This is especially true for next-generation mobile communication systems that are expected to support the creation of a ubiquitous society where virtually everything is connected and made available within an organic information network. Resources will frequently join or leave the network, new types of media or new combinations of existing types will be used to interact and cooperate, and services will be tailored to preferences and needs of individual customers to better meet their needs. This paper outlines our research in the area of dynamic service adaptation to provide concepts and technologies allowing for such environments. Copyright (C) 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Virtual machine (VM) implementations are made of intricately intertwined subsystems, interacting largely through implicit dependencies. As the degree of crosscutting present in VMs is very high, VM implementations exhibit significant internal complexity. This study proposes an architecture approach for VMs that regards a VM as a composite of service modules coordinated through explicit bidirectional interfaces. Aspect-oriented programming techniques are used to establish these interfaces, to coordinate module interaction, and to declaratively express concrete VM architectures. A VM architecture description language is presented in a case study, illustrating the application of the proposed architectural principles.
Pattern matching is a well-established concept in the functional programming community. It provides the means for concisely identifying and destructuring values of interest. This enables a clean separation of data structures and respective functionality, as well as dispatching functionality based on more than a single value. Unfortunately, expressive pattern matching facilities are seldomly incorporated in present object-oriented programming languages. We present a seamless integration of pattern matching facilities in an object-oriented and dynamically typed programming language: Newspeak. We describe language extensions to improve the practicability and integrate our additions with the existing programming environment for Newspeak. This report is based on the first author’s master’s thesis.
CSOM/PL is a software product line (SPL) derived from applying multi-dimensional separation of concerns (MDSOC) techniques to the domain of high-level language virtual machine (VM) implementations. For CSOM/PL, we modularised CSOM, a Smalltalk VM implemented in C, using VMADL (virtual machine architecture description language). Several features of the original CSOM were encapsulated in VMADL modules and composed in various combinations. In an evaluation of our approach, we show that applying MDSOC and SPL principles to a domain as complex as that of VMs is not only feasible but beneficial, as it improves understandability, maintainability, and configurability of VM implementations without harming performance.
Context-oriented programming (COP) provides dedicated support for defining and composing variations to a basic program behavior. A variation, which is defined within a layer, can be de-/activated for the dynamic extent of a code block. While this mechanism allows for control flow-specific scoping, expressing behavior adaptations can demand alternative scopes. For instance, adaptations can depend on dynamic object structure rather than control flow. We present scenarios for behavior adaptation and identify the need for new scoping mechanisms. The increasing number of scoping mechanisms calls for new language abstractions representing them. We suggest to open the implementation of scoping mechanisms so that developers can extend the COP language core according to their specific needs. Our open implementation moves layer composition into objects to be affected and with that closer to the method dispatch to be changed. We discuss the implementation of established COP scoping mechanisms using our approach and present new scoping mechanisms developed for our enhancements to Lively Kernel.
Version Control Systems (VCS) allow developers to manage changes to software artifacts. Developers interact with VCSs through a variety of client programs, such as graphical front-ends or command line tools. It is desirable to use the same version control client program against different VCSs. Unfortunately, no established abstraction over VCS concepts exists. Instead, VCS client programs implement ad-hoc solutions to support interaction with multiple VCSs. This thesis presents Pur, an abstraction over version control concepts that allows building rich client programs that can interact with multiple VCSs. We provide an implementation of this abstraction and validate it by implementing a client application.
Use-cases are considered an integral part of most contemporary development processes since they describe a software system's expected behavior from the perspective of its prospective users. However, the presence of and traceability to use-cases is increasingly lost in later more code-centric development activities. Use-cases, being well-encapsulated at the level of requirements descriptions, eventually lead to crosscutting concerns in system design and source code. Tracing which parts of the system contribute to which use-cases is therefore hard and so limits understandability.
In this paper, we propose an approach to making use-cases first-class entities in both the programming language and the runtime environment. Having use-cases present in the code and the running system will allow developers, maintainers, and operators to easily associate their units of work with what matters to the users. We suggest the combination of use-cases, acceptance tests, and dynamic analysis to automatically associate source code with use-cases. We present UseCasePy, an implementation of our approach to use-case-centered development in Python, and its application to the Django Web framework.
Program behavior that relies on contextual information, such as physical location or network accessibility, is common in today's applications, yet its representation is not sufficiently supported by programming languages. With context-oriented programming (COP), such context-dependent behavioral variations can be explicitly modularized and dynamically activated. In general, COP could be used to manage any context-specific behavior. However, its contemporary realizations limit the control of dynamic adaptation. This, in turn, limits the interaction of COP's adaptation mechanisms with widely used architectures, such as event-based, mobile, and distributed programming. The JCop programming language extends Java with language constructs for context-oriented programming and additionally provides a domain-specific aspect language for declarative control over runtime adaptations. As a result, these redesigned implementations are more concise and better modularized than their counterparts using plain COP. JCop's main features have been described in our previous publications. However, a complete language specification has not been presented so far. This report presents the entire JCop language including the syntax and semantics of its new language constructs.
Developing rich Web applications can be a complex job - especially when it comes to mobile device support. Web-based environments such as Lively Webwerkstatt can help developers implement such applications by making the development process more direct and interactive. Further the process of developing software is collaborative which creates the need that the development environment offers collaboration facilities. This report describes extensions of the webbased development environment Lively Webwerkstatt such that it can be used in a mobile environment. The extensions are collaboration mechanisms, user interface adaptations but as well event processing and performance measuring on mobile devices.
Die Komplexität heutiger Geschäftsabläufe und die Menge der zu verwaltenden Daten stellen hohe Anforderungen an die Entwicklung und Wartung von Geschäftsanwendungen. Ihr Umfang entsteht unter anderem aus der Vielzahl von Modellentitäten und zugehörigen Nutzeroberflächen zur Bearbeitung und Analyse der Daten. Dieser Bericht präsentiert neuartige Konzepte und deren Umsetzung zur Vereinfachung der Entwicklung solcher umfangreichen Geschäftsanwendungen. Erstens: Wir schlagen vor, die Datenbank und die Laufzeitumgebung einer dynamischen objektorientierten Programmiersprache zu vereinen. Hierzu organisieren wir die Speicherstruktur von Objekten auf die Weise einer spaltenorientierten Hauptspeicherdatenbank und integrieren darauf aufbauend Transaktionen sowie eine deklarative Anfragesprache nahtlos in dieselbe Laufzeitumgebung. Somit können transaktionale und analytische Anfragen in derselben objektorientierten Hochsprache implementiert werden, und dennoch nah an den Daten ausgeführt werden. Zweitens: Wir beschreiben Programmiersprachkonstrukte, welche es erlauben, Nutzeroberflächen sowie Nutzerinteraktionen generisch und unabhängig von konkreten Modellentitäten zu beschreiben. Um diese abstrakte Beschreibung nutzen zu können, reichert man die Domänenmodelle um vormals implizite Informationen an. Neue Modelle müssen nur um einige Informationen erweitert werden um bereits vorhandene Nutzeroberflächen und -interaktionen auch für sie verwenden zu können. Anpassungen, die nur für ein Modell gelten sollen, können unabhängig vom Standardverhalten, inkrementell, definiert werden. Drittens: Wir ermöglichen mit einem weiteren Programmiersprachkonstrukt die zusammenhängende Beschreibung von Abläufen der Anwendung, wie z.B. Bestellprozesse. Unser Programmierkonzept kapselt Nutzerinteraktionen in synchrone Funktionsaufrufe und macht somit Prozesse als zusammenhängende Folge von Berechnungen und Interaktionen darstellbar. Viertens: Wir demonstrieren ein Konzept, wie Endnutzer komplexe analytische Anfragen intuitiver formulieren können. Es basiert auf der Idee, dass Endnutzer Anfragen als Konfiguration eines Diagramms sehen. Entsprechend beschreibt ein Nutzer eine Anfrage, indem er beschreibt, was sein Diagramm darstellen soll. Nach diesem Konzept beschriebene Diagramme enthalten ausreichend Informationen, um daraus eine Anfrage generieren zu können. Hinsichtlich der Ausführungsdauer sind die generierten Anfragen äquivalent zu Anfragen, die mit konventionellen Anfragesprachen formuliert sind. Das Anfragemodell setzen wir in einem Prototypen um, der auf den zuvor eingeführten Konzepten aufsetzt.
Programmers make many changes to the program to eventually find a good solution for a given task. In this course of change, every intermediate development state can of value, when, for example, a promising ideas suddenly turn out inappropriate or the interplay of objects turns out more complex than initially expected before making changes. Programmers would benefit from tool support that provides immediate access to source code and run-time of previous development states of interest. We present IDE extensions, implemented for Squeak/Smalltalk, to preserve, retrieve, and work with this information. With such tool support, programmers can work without worries because they can rely on tools that help them with whatever their explorations will reveal. They no longer have to follow certain best practices only to avoid undesired consequences of changing code.
Constraints allow developers to specify desired properties of systems in a number of domains, and have those properties be maintained automatically. This results in compact, declarative code, avoiding scattered code to check and imperatively re-satisfy invariants. Despite these advantages, constraint programming is not yet widespread, with standard imperative programming still the norm. There is a long history of research on integrating constraint programming with the imperative paradigm. However, this integration typically does not unify the constructs for encapsulation and abstraction from both paradigms. This impedes re-use of modules, as client code written in one paradigm can only use modules written to support that paradigm. Modules require redundant definitions if they are to be used in both paradigms. We present a language – Babelsberg – that unifies the constructs for en- capsulation and abstraction by using only object-oriented method definitions for both declarative and imperative code. Our prototype – Babelsberg/R – is an extension to Ruby, and continues to support Ruby’s object-oriented se- mantics. It allows programmers to add constraints to existing Ruby programs in incremental steps by placing them on the results of normal object-oriented message sends. It is implemented by modifying a state-of-the-art Ruby virtual machine. The performance of standard object-oriented code without con- straints is only modestly impacted, with typically less than 10% overhead compared with the unmodified virtual machine. Furthermore, our architec- ture for adding multiple constraint solvers allows Babelsberg to deal with constraints in a variety of domains. We argue that our approach provides a useful step toward making con- straint solving a generic tool for object-oriented programmers. We also provide example applications, written in our Ruby-based implementation, which use constraints in a variety of application domains, including interactive graphics, circuit simulations, data streaming with both hard and soft constraints on performance, and configuration file Management.
There are two common approaches to implement a virtual machine (VM) for a dynamic object-oriented language. On the one hand, it can be implemented in a C-like language for best performance and maximum control over the resulting executable. On the other hand, it can be implemented in a language such as Java that allows for higher-level abstractions. These abstractions, such as proper object-oriented modularization, automatic memory management, or interfaces, are missing in C-like languages but they can simplify the implementation of prevalent but complex concepts in VMs, such as garbage collectors (GCs) or just-in-time compilers (JITs). Yet, the implementation of a dynamic object-oriented language in Java eventually results in two VMs on top of each other (double stack), which impedes performance. For statically typed languages, the Maxine VM solves this problem; it is written in Java but can be executed without a Java virtual machine (JVM). However, it is currently not possible to execute dynamic object-oriented languages in Maxine. This work presents an approach to bringing object models and execution models of dynamic object-oriented languages to the Maxine VM and the application of this approach to Squeak/Smalltalk. The representation of objects in and the execution of dynamic object-oriented languages pose certain challenges to the Maxine VM that lacks certain variation points necessary to enable an effortless and straightforward implementation of dynamic object-oriented languages' execution models. The implementation of Squeak/Smalltalk in Maxine as a feasibility study is to unveil such missing variation points.
In object-oriented programming, polymorphic dispatch of operations decouples clients from specific providers of services and allows implementations to be modified or substituted without affecting clients.
The Uniform Access Principle (UAP) tries to extend these qualities to resource access by demanding that access to state be indistinguishable from access to operations. Despite language features supporting the UAP, the overall goal of substitutability has not been achieved for either alternative resources such as keyed storage, files or web pages, or for alternate access mechanisms: specific kinds of resources are bound to specific access mechanisms and vice versa. Changing storage or access patterns either requires changes to both clients and service providers and trying to maintain the UAP imposes significant penalties in terms of code-duplication and/or performance overhead.
We propose introducing first class identifiers as polymorphic names for storage locations to solve these problems. With these Polymorphic Identifiers, we show that we can provide uniform access to a wide variety of resource types as well as storage and access mechanisms, whether parametrized or direct, without affecting client code, without causing code duplication or significant performance penalties.
Design and Implementation of service-oriented architectures imposes a huge number of research questions from the fields of software engineering, system analysis and modeling, adaptability, and application integration. Component orientation and web services are two approaches for design and realization of complex web-based system. Both approaches allow for dynamic application adaptation as well as integration of enterprise application. Commonly used technologies, such as J2EE and .NET, form de facto standards for the realization of complex distributed systems. Evolution of component systems has lead to web services and service-based architectures. This has been manifested in a multitude of industry standards and initiatives such as XML, WSDL UDDI, SOAP, etc. All these achievements lead to a new and promising paradigm in IT systems engineering which proposes to design complex software solutions as collaboration of contractually defined software services. Service-Oriented Systems Engineering represents a symbiosis of best practices in object-orientation, component-based development, distributed computing, and business process management. It provides integration of business and IT concerns. The annual Ph.D. Retreat of the Research School provides each member the opportunity to present his/her current state of their research and to give an outline of a prospective Ph.D. thesis. Due to the interdisciplinary structure of the Research Scholl, this technical report covers a wide range of research topics. These include but are not limited to: Self-Adaptive Service-Oriented Systems, Operating System Support for Service-Oriented Systems, Architecture and Modeling of Service-Oriented Systems, Adaptive Process Management, Services Composition and Workflow Planning, Security Engineering of Service-Based IT Systems, Quantitative Analysis and Optimization of Service-Oriented Systems, Service-Oriented Systems in 3D Computer Graphics sowie Service-Oriented Geoinformatics.
We present Pycket, a high-performance tracing JIT compiler for Racket. Pycket supports a wide variety of the sophisticated features in Racket such as contracts, continuations, classes, structures, dynamic binding, and more. On average, over a standard suite of benchmarks, Pycket outperforms existing compilers, both Racket's JIT and other highly-optimizing Scheme compilers. Further, Pycket provides much better performance for Racket proxies than existing systems, dramatically reducing the overhead of contracts and gradual typing. We validate this claim with performance evaluation on multiple existing benchmark suites.
The Pycket implementation is of independent interest as an application of the RPython meta-tracing framework (originally created for PyPy), which automatically generates tracing JIT compilers from interpreters. Prior work on meta-tracing focuses on bytecode interpreters, whereas Pycket is a high-level interpreter based on the CEK abstract machine and operates directly on abstract syntax trees. Pycket supports proper tail calls and first-class continuations. In the setting of a functional language, where recursion and higher-order functions are more prevalent than explicit loops, the most significant performance challenge for a tracing JIT is identifying which control flows constitute a loop-we discuss two strategies for identifying loops and measure their impact.
We report our experience in implementing SqueakJS, a bitcompatible implementation of Squeak/Smalltalk written in pure JavaScript. SqueakJS runs entirely in theWeb browser with a virtual file system that can be directed to a server or client-side storage. Our implementation is notable for simplicity and performance gained through adaptation to the host object memory and deployment leverage gained through the Lively Web development environment. We present several novel techniques as well as performance measurements for the resulting virtual machine. Much of this experience is potentially relevant to preserving other dynamic language systems and making them available in a browser-based environment.
We present object versioning as a generic approach to preserve access to previous development and application states. Version-aware references can manage the modifications made to the target object and record versions as desired. Such references can be provided without modifications to the virtual machine. We used proxies to implement the proposed concepts and demonstrate the Lively Kernel running on top of this object versioning layer. This enables Lively users to undo the effects of direct manipulation and other programming actions.