Detail

A Tale of Distributed Transparency and Partial Failures

Even though distributed systems are wide-spread, building them is still hard due to their inherent concurrency combined with the fact that components can fail independently, i.e. failures are partial. In order to support the systematic construction of distributed systems, my research tries to aid developers with both novel programming constructs and tool support.

In this talk I will first reflect on the research in the context of the AmbientTalk language conducted at the SOFT lab over the past decade. AmbientTalk is a distributed actor-based programming language specially designed to aid the construction of distributed applications running on mobile ad hoc networks. I will introduce AmbientTalk’s key programming features based on ambient-oriented programming. In particular, I will stress my research exploring the trade-off between novel programming abstractions that aid with the difficulties of failure handling, on the one hand, and providing mechanisms that allow developers to be aware of their effects and take them into account in the design and construction of applications, on the other hand. I will then describe recent work which pushes further ambient-oriented programming research into the area of edge computing and geo-replicated applications.