Programming languages (ASCOLA)
In the late 1990s Sun Microsystems predicted that soon the day would come when "the network is the computer". One of the questions raised today in the software industry is how to bring about this prediction and how to reach the scale of applications corresponding to the vision of the Internet as a gigantic "operating system . The answer is through proposing new software architecture that enable the design, deployment and running of applications obtained by assembling components and services found on the web. To participate in this new development of architectures, and to better understand and formalize them, ASCOLA tackles the difficult issue of implementation of the "component model". To do this, researchers are developing techniques derived from programming languages and in particular from object-oriented languages. The idea is to study post-object programming leading to an evolution from small scale programming (in the small) as allowed by the object-oriented languages such as Smalltalk, Java and C # to large scale programming(in the large) such as to be found with component moodels. The team focuses in particular on:
- Seeking a continuum between object, aspect and component approaches;
- Construction of a set of tools for the analysis, processing, interpretation and implementation of programs suited to these three approaches;
- The development of applications in the areas of operating systems (Linux schedulers and Web caches) and middleware (distributed components, business components and web services).
This research is conducted in collaboration with IBM (St Nazaire, Zurich, Ottawa, Hursley), Microsoft Research, Siemens, France Telecom R & D (Orange Labs), Sodifrance, VirtualLogix.
