CommerceNet Events

CommerceNet developer and UC Santa Cruz graduate student Elias Sinderson will be previewing his advancement-to-candidacy presentation at our Thursday Tech Talk series on April 13th…

The Web has, perhaps somewhat arguably, become the preferred platform for building distributed applications. Even given the power of current toolkits, however, it is unfortunately difficult to build truly collaborative, Web-based applications of a sufficiently interesting size due to the inherent difficulties of reasoning about the interaction and coordination of multiple systems or services.

We outline a research agenda centered on exploring the parallels that have been identified between the tuplespace programming model and the REST architectural style as realized by the Web, as well as the implications thereof. As operational hypothesis for this work, we make the following assertions.

First, that the Web may be regarded as a kind of tuplespaces and, second, that the HTTP + WebDAV protocol stack may be treated formally as a coordination language. We claim that the intersection of the tuplespace programming model and the REST architectural style is fertile ground, worthy of further research, and that the development and application of formalisms to reason about Web-based applications will be a lasting contribution to the field.

Tuplespaces are broadly applicable, from parallel programming tasks to service provisioning in distributed systems to providing the foundation for collaborative environments in CSCW applications. If the above hypotheses hold, then these types of systems should be able to leverage the existing web infrastructure to their advantage.

Further, we note that there are no widely accepted methods for reasoning formally about the behavior of large distributed and / or decentralized systems built upon web technologies. If the formal approaches that have been developed to reason about coordination languages and tuplespace systems are successfully applied to application layer protocols (HTTP + WebDAV) and Web-based systems, the impact upon web application engineering would be significant.

Highlighting the parallels that exist between these domains will provide design beacons for Web-based applications, illuminating a familiar landscape with known architectural principles and design patterns. In doing so, hopefully, this work will serve to encourage good software engineering practices and further advance the state of the art in distributed systems design.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 13th, 2006 at 4:00 pm and is filed under Talks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.