Homepage>Publikationen>PublikationsDetail

CoBoxes: Unifying Active Objects and Structured Heaps

In: G. Barthe and F. de Boered., 10th IFIP International Conference on Formal Methods for Open Object-Based Distributed Systems (FMOODS 2008). LNCS, volume 5051, p. 201--219, 2008

Authors

Jan Schäfer
Arnd Poetzsch-Heffter

Abstract

Concurrent programming in object-oriented languages is a notoriously difficult task. We propose coboxes -- a novel language concept which combines and generalizes active objects and techniques for heap structuring. CoBoxes realize a data-centric approach that guarantees mutual-exclusion for groups of objects. This is important for more complex data structures with invariants ranging over several objects. CoBoxes support multiple entry objects, several cooperating tasks in a cobox, and nesting of coboxes for composition and internal parallelism.Communication between coboxes is handled by asynchronous method calls with futures, which is in particular suitable for distributed programming.In this paper, we explain how aspects of concurrent programming can be solved by coboxes. We develop a core language for coboxes and present a formal operational semantics for this language.

Full Text

PDF: fmoods08coboxes.pdf
PS.GZ: fmoods08coboxes.ps.gz

BibTeX

@InProceedings{Schaefer.Poetzsch-Heffter08coboxes, 
   author = {Jan Schäfer and Arnd Poetzsch-Heffter}
   title = {CoBoxes: Unifying Active Objects and Structured Heaps},
   booktitle = {10th IFIP International Conference on Formal Methods for Open Object-Based Distributed Systems (FMOODS 2008)},
   series = {LNCS},
   publisher = {Springer},
   pages = {201--219},
   year = {2008},
}

Einloggen