Implementing incremental code migration with XML

ABSTRACT

We demonstrate how XML and related technologies can be used for code mobility at any granularity, thus overcoming the restrictions of existing approaches. By not fixing a particular granularity for mobile code, we enable complete programs as well as individual lines of code to be sent across the network. We define the concept of incremental code mobility as the ability to migrate and add, remove, or replace code fragments (i.e., increments) in a remote program. The combination of fine-grained and incremental migration achieves a previously unavailable degree of flexibility. We examine the application of incremental and fine-grained code migration to a variety of domains, including user interface management, application management on mobile thin clients, for example PDAs, and management of distributed documents.

REFERENCES

• 1: IBM Alphaworks. MoDAL. http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/modal, 1999.
• 2: IBM Alphaworks. XML4J. http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/xml4j, 1999.
• 3: V. Apparao, S. Byrne, M. Champion, S. Isaacs, I. Jacobs, A. Le Hors, G. Nicol, J. Robie, R. Sutor, C. Wilson, and L. Wood. Document Object Model (DOM) Level 1 Specification. W3C Recommendation http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-DOM-Level-1- 19981001, World Wide Web Consortium, October 1998.
• 4: Grady Booch , James Rumbaugh , Ivar Jacobson, The Unified Modeling Language user guide, Addison Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Redwood City, CA, 1999
• 5: Tim Bray , Jean Paoli , C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, Extensible markup language, World Wide Web Journal, v.2 n.4, p.29-66, Winter 1997
• 6: Luca Cardelli, A language with distributed scope, Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages, p.286-297, January 23-25, 1995, San Francisco, California, United States [doi>10.1145/199448.199516]
• 7: Luca Cardelli , Andrew D. Gordon, Mobile Ambients, Proceedings of the First International Conference on Foundations of Software Science and Computation Structure, p.140-155, March 28-April 04, 1998
• 8: P. Ciancarini , F. Franzé , C. Mascolo, Using a coordination language to specify and analyze systems containing mobile components, ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), v.9 n.2, p.167-198, April 2000 [doi>10.1145/350887.350893]
• 9: Paolo Ciancarini , Fabio Vitali , Cecilia Mascolo, Managing Complex Documents Over the WWW: A Case Study for XML, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, v.11 n.4, p.629-638, July 1999 [doi>10.1109/69.790821]
• 10: E. Ellmer, W. Emmerich, A. Finkelstein, D. Smolko, and A. Zisman. Consistency Management of Distributed Documents using XML and Related Technologies. Research Note 99-94, University College London, Dept. of Computer Science, 1999. Submitted for Publication.
• 11: Wolfgang Emmerich , Walter Schwarz , Anthony Finkelstein, Markup Meets Middleware, Proceedings of the 7th IEEE Workshop on Future Trends of Distributed Computing Systems, p.261, December 20-20, 1999
• 12: Cédric Fournet , Georges Gonthier , Jean-Jacques Lévy , Luc Maranget , Didier Rémy, A Calculus of Mobile Agents, Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Concurrency Theory, p.406-421, August 26-29, 1996
• 13: Alfonso Fuggetta , Gian Pietro Picco , Giovanni Vigna, Understanding Code Mobility, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, v.24 n.5, p.342-361, May 1998 [doi>10.1109/32.685258]
• 14: R.S. Gray. Agent Tcl: A transportable agent system. In Proc. of the CIKM Workshop on Intelligent Information Agents, Baltimore, Md., Dec. 1995.
• 15: ISO 8879. Information processing - Text and Office Systems - Standardised General Markup Language SGML. Technical report, International Standards Organisation, 1986.
• 16: JavaSoft. Java Remote Method Invocation Specification, revision 1.50, jdk 1.2 edition, October 1998.
• 17: Joseph Kiniry , Daniel Zimmerman, A Hands-On Look at Java Mobile Agents, IEEE Internet Computing, v.1 n.4, p.21-30, July 1997 [doi>10.1109/4236.612210]
• 18: D. E. Knuth. Semantics of Context-Free Languages. Mathematical Systems Theory, 2(2):127-145, 1968.
• 19: General Magic. Telescript Language Reference. General Magic, Oct. 1995.
• 20: E. Maler and S. DeRose. XML Linking Language (XLink). Technical Report http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/WD-xlink- 19980303, World Wide Web Consortium, March 1998.
• 21: Cecilia Mascolo , Gian Pietro Picco , Gruia-Catalin Roman, A fine-grained model for code mobility, Proceedings of the 7th European software engineering conference held jointly with the 7th ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering, p.39-56, September 06-10, 1999, Toulouse, France
• 22: Peter J. McCann , Gruia-Catalin Roman, Compositional Programming Abstractions for Mobile Computing, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, v.24 n.2, p.97-110, February 1998 [doi>10.1109/32.666824]
• 23: Object Management Group. XML Meta Data Interchange (XMI) - Proposal to the OMG OA&DTF RFP 3: Stream-based Model Interchange Format (SMIF). 492 Old Connecti-cut Path, Framingham, MA 01701, USA, October 1998.
• 24: Object Management Group. XML/Value Request for Proposals. 492 Old Connecticut Path, Framingham, MA 01701, USA, August 1999.
• 25: R. Pattis, J. Roberts, and M. Stehlik. Karel the Robot. Wiley, 1994.
• 26: BlueStone Software. XML Contact. http://www.bluestone.com/xml/XML-Contact/, 1999.
• 27: BlueStone Software. XwingML. http://www.bluestone.com/xml/XwingML/, 1999.
• 28: James W. Stamos , David K. Gifford, Remote evaluation, ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), v.12 n.4, p.537-564, Oct. 1990 [doi>10.1145/88616.88631]
• 29: J. Suzuki and Y. Yamamoto. Making UML models exchangeable over the Internet with XML: The UXF Approach. In P.-A. Muller and J. Bezivin, editors, Proc. of Int. Workshop on UML '98, Mulhouse, France, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer, 1999. To appear.
• 30: C.F. Tschudin. An Introduction to the M0 Messenger Language. Univ. of Geneva, Switzerland, 1994.
• 31: David Wong , Noemi Paciorek , Dana Moore, Java-based mobile agents, Communications of the ACM, v.42 n.3, p.92-ff., March 1999 [doi>10.1145/295685.295717]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.7 DOCUMENT AND TEXT PROCESSING
      I.7.2 Document Preparation

          Nouns: XML

Additional Classification:
  E. Data
  E.4 CODING AND INFORMATION THEORY
      Subjects: Data compaction and compression

  K. Computing Milieux
  K.6 MANAGEMENT OF COMPUTING AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS
      K.6.3 Software Management
          Subjects: Software development

General Terms:
Design, Languages, Performance, Theory

Keywords:
XML technologies, incremental code migration