article

Programming dynamically reconfigurable open systems with SALSA

Authors:

Gul AghaAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 36, Issue 12

Pages 20 - 34

https://doi.org/10.1145/583960.583964

Published: 01 December 2001 Publication History

Abstract

Applications running on the Internet, or on limited-resource devices, need to be able to adapt to changes in their execution environment at run-time. Current languages and systems fall short of enabling developers to migrate and reconfigure application sub-components at program-execution time.In this paper, we describe essential aspects of the design and implementation of SALSA, an actor-based language for mobile and Internet computing. SALSA simplifies programming dynamically reconfigurable, open applications by providing universal names, active objects, and migration. Moreover, SALSA introduces three language mechanisms to help programmers coordinate asynchronous, mobile computations: token-passing continuations, join continuations and first-class continuations.We provide some examples which illustrate how SALSA programs are not only dynamically reconfigurable and open, but also much more concise and easier to follow than comparable Java code. Furthermore, we provide empirical results which show SALSA's performance to be better than Java code using an actor library, and which illustrate the difference between local, local area, and wide area communication and migration. Finally, we discuss the implementation of our preprocessor which translates SALSA code into Java.

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Cited By

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https://doi.org/10.2478/ijanmc-2023-0078
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Casadei RDamiani FTorta GViroli M(2024)Actor-Based Designs for Distributed Self-organisation ProgrammingActive Object Languages: Current Research Trends10.1007/978-3-031-51060-1_2(37-58)Online publication date: 29-Jan-2024
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Index Terms

Programming dynamically reconfigurable open systems with SALSA
1. Networks
  1. Network types
    1. Mobile networks
    2. Wireless access networks
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language types
        Object oriented languages

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Published In

cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 36, Issue 12

December 2001

77 pages

ISSN:0362-1340

EISSN:1558-1160

DOI:10.1145/583960

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2001 Authors.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 December 2001

Published in SIGPLAN Volume 36, Issue 12

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https://doi.org/10.2478/ijanmc-2023-0078
Klenk KSpiteri R(2024)Improving resource utilization and fault tolerance in large simulations via actorsCluster Computing10.1007/s10586-024-04318-527:5(6323-6340)Online publication date: 28-Feb-2024
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