Abstract
Wide-area networks such as the Internet support distributed applications that occasionally incorporate services owned and operated by third parties. These third-party network services must be reliable and secure; they must support efficient and responsive applications; finally, they must be cost-effective. Can programming languages contribute to achieving these goals? This paper responds to that question by relating experience with the Phone Markup Language (PML), and its role in a project code-named “PhoneWeb”. The PhoneWeb provides Voice Response Unit (VRU) capabilities to untrusted remote clients by accepting PML programs and executing them: PML acts as the PhoneWeb “service interface”. By using a language as the service interface, we have obtained the performance benefits due to mobile code; and through restrictions on our language we have achieved security and reliability. The resulting service allows us to timeshare the underlying hardware, yielding a solution that is more cost-effective than its alternatives.
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© 1999 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Ramming, J.C. (1999). PML: A Language Interface to Distributed Voice-Response Units. In: Bal, H.E., Belkhouche, B., Cardelli, L. (eds) Internet Programming Languages. ICCL 1998. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1686. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-47959-7_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-47959-7_5
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