Article

JCoBox: generalizing active objects to concurrent components

Authors:

Arnd Poetzsch-HeffterAuthors Info & Claims

ECOOP'10: Proceedings of the 24th European conference on Object-oriented programming

Pages 275 - 299

Published: 21 June 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Concurrency in object-oriented languages is still waiting for a satisfactory solution. Formany application areas, standardmechanisms like threads and locks are too low level and have shown to be error-prone and notmodular enough. Lately the actor paradigm has regained attention as a possible solution to concurrency in OOLs.

We propose JCoBox: a Java extension with an actor-like concurrencymodel based on the notion of concurrently running object groups, so-called coboxes. Communication is based on asynchronous method calls with standard objects as targets. Cooperative multi-tasking within coboxes allows for combining active and reactive behavior in a simple and safe way. Futures and promises lead to a data-driven synchronization of tasks.

This paper describes the concurrency model, the formal semantics, and the implementation of JCoBox, and shows that the performance of the implementation is comparable to state-of-the-art actor-based language implementations for the JVM.

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ECOOP'10: Proceedings of the 24th European conference on Object-oriented programming

June 2010

599 pages

ISBN:3642141064

Editor:
Theo D'Hondt
Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Software Languages Lab, Brussels, Belgium

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Google Inc.

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Springer-Verlag

Berlin, Heidelberg

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Published: 21 June 2010

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10817-016-9400-6
Summers AMüller P(2016)Actor ServicesProceedings of the 25th European Symposium on Programming Languages and Systems - Volume 963210.5555/3089528.3089555(699-726)Online publication date: 2-Apr-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3089528.3089555
Corrodi CHeuβner APoskitt C(2016)A Graph-Based Semantics Workbench for Concurrent Asynchronous ProgramsProceedings of the 19th International Conference on Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 963310.5555/3089458.3089463(31-48)Online publication date: 2-Apr-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3089458.3089463
Peters AKitchin DThywissen JCook W(2016)OrcO: a concurrency-first approach to objectsACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3022671.298402251:10(548-567)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3022671.2984022
Peters AKitchin DThywissen JCook WVisser ESmaragdakis Y(2016)OrcO: a concurrency-first approach to objectsProceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications10.1145/2983990.2984022(548-567)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2016
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Ricci AAgha GBordini RMarron A(2015)Special issue on programming based on actors, agents and decentralized controlScience of Computer Programming10.1016/j.scico.2014.10.00398:P2(117-119)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2015
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