From sequential programs to multi-tier applications by program transformation

ABSTRACT

Modern applications are designed in multiple tiers to separate concerns. Since each tier may run at a separate location, middleware is required to mediate access between tiers. However, introducing this middleware is tiresome and error-prone.We propose a multi-tier calculus and a splitting transformation to address this problem. The multi-tier calculus serves as a sequential core programming language for constructing a multi-tier application. The application can be developed in the sequential setting. Splitting extracts one process per tier from the sequential program such that their concurrent execution behaves like the original program.The splitting transformation starts from an assignment of primitive operations to tiers. A program analysis determines communication requirements and inserts remote procedure calls. The next transformation step performs resource pooling: it optimizes the communication behavior by transforming sequences of remote procedure calls to a stream-based protocol. The final transformation step splits the resulting program into separate communicating processes.The multi-tier calculus is also applicable to the construction of interactive Web applications. It facilitates their development by providing a uniform programming framework for client-side and server-side programming.

REFERENCES

• 1: Cormac Flanagan , Amr Sabry , Bruce F. Duba , Matthias Felleisen, The essence of compiling with continuations, Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 1993 conference on Programming language design and implementation, p.237-247, June 21-25, 1993, Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States
• 2: Simon J. Gay , Malcolm Hole, Types and Subtypes for Client-Server Interactions, Proceedings of the 8th European Symposium on Programming Languages and Systems, p.74-90, March 22-28, 1999
• 3: Andrew D. Gordon, Bisimilarity as a theory of functional programming, Theoretical Computer Science, v.228 n.1-2, p.5-47, Oct. 1999 [doi>10.1016/S0304-3975(98)00353-3]
• 4: John Greiner , Guy E. Blelloch, A provably time-efficient parallel implementation of full speculation, ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), v.21 n.2, p.240-285, March 1999 [doi>10.1145/316686.316690]
• 5: Fritz Henglein, Efficient Type Inference for Higher-Order Binding-Time Analysis, Proceedings of the 5th ACM Conference on Functional Programming Languages and Computer Architecture, p.448-472, August 26-30, 1991
• 6: Proceedings of the 5th ACM conference on Functional programming languages and computer architecture, June 1991
• 7: Neil D. Jones , Carsten K. Gomard , Peter Sestoft, Partial evaluation and automatic program generation, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1993
• 8: Jens Krinke, Context-sensitive slicing of concurrent programs, Proceedings of the 9th European software engineering conference held jointly with 11th ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering, September 01-05, 2003, Helsinki, Finland
• 9: X. Leroy. The Objective Caml system release 3.02, Documentation and user's manual. INRIA, France, July 2001. http://pauillac.inria.fr/caml.
• 10: R. Milner, Communication and Concurrency, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1989
• 11: Mangala Gowri Nanda , S. Ramesh, Slicing concurrent programs, Proceedings of the 2000 ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Software testing and analysis, p.180-190, August 21-24, 2000, Portland, Oregon, United States
• 12: David Park, Concurrency and Automata on Infinite Sequences, Proceedings of the 5th GI-Conference on Theoretical Computer Science, p.167-183, March 23-25, 1981
• 13: S. L. Peyton Jones, Parallel implementations of functional programming languages, The Computer Journal, v.32 n.2, p.175-186, April 1989 [doi>10.1093/comjnl/32.2.175]
• 14: Simon L. Peyton Jones , John Launchbury, Unboxed Values as First Class Citizens in a Non-Strict Functional Language, Proceedings of the 5th ACM Conference on Functional Programming Languages and Computer Architecture, p.636-666, August 26-30, 1991
• 15: W. Richard Stevens, UNIX network programming, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1990
• 16: Yan Mei Tang , Pierre Jouvelot, Effect systems with subtyping, Proceedings of the 1995 ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Partial evaluation and semantics-based program manipulation, p.45-53, June 21-23, 1995, La Jolla, California, United States [doi>10.1145/215465.215552]
• 17: F. Tip. A survey of program slicing techniques. J. Programming Languages, 3(3):121--189, 1995.
• 18: David Walker , Karl Crary , Greg Morrisett, Typed memory management via static capabilities, ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), v.22 n.4, p.701-771, July 2000 [doi>10.1145/363911.363923]
• 19: Steve Zdancewic , Lantian Zheng , Nathaniel Nystrom , Andrew C. Myers, Secure program partitioning, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS), v.20 n.3, p.283-328, August 2002 [doi>10.1145/566340.566343]
• 20: Lantian Zheng , Stephen Chong , Andrew C. Myers , Steve Zdancewic, Using Replication and Partitioning to Build Secure Distributed Systems, Proceedings of the 2003 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, p.236, May 11-14, 2003

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.1 PROGRAMMING TECHNIQUES
      D.1.3 Concurrent Programming
          Subjects: Distributed programming

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.1 PROGRAMMING TECHNIQUES
      D.1.2 Automatic Programming

  F. Theory of Computation
  F.3 LOGICS AND MEANINGS OF PROGRAMS
      F.3.2 Semantics of Programming Languages
          Subjects: Operational semantics

General Terms:
Design, Languages, Theory

Keywords:
application partioning, concurrency, type systems