A Survey of Active Object Languages

Abstract

International audienceTo program parallel systems efficiently and easily, a wide range of programming models have been proposed, each with different choices concerning synchronization and communication between parallel entities. Among them, the actor model is based on loosely coupled parallel entities that communicate by means of asynchronous messages and mailboxes. Some actor languages provide a strong integration with object-oriented concepts; these are often called active object languages. This paper reviews four major actor and active object languages and compares them according to carefully chosen dimensions that cover central aspects of the programming paradigms and their implementation

Implementing SOS with Active Objects: A Case Study of a Multicore Memory System

“…ABS is a modeling language for designing, verifying, and executing concurrent software [4]. The language combines the syntax and object-oriented style of Java with the Actor model of concurrency [10] into active objects which decouple communication and synchronization using asynchronous method calls, futures and cooperative scheduling [5]. Although only one thread of control can execute in an active object at any time, cooperative scheduling allows different threads to interleave at explicitly declared points in the code.…”

“…This paper considers an implementation of the SOS model in ABS [4], a language tailored to the description of distributed systems based on active objects [5]. ABS is formally defined by an operational semantics and supports parallel execution on backends in Erlang, Haskell, and Java.…”

Who is to Blame? Runtime Verification of Distributed Objects with Active Monitors

“…The PROACTIVE programming platform PROACTIVE [1,6] is a Java library for building concurrent and distributed software that implements the active objects [5] design pattern. The active objects paradigm-largely inspired by Actors [19]simplifies distributed programming by abstracting concurrency and locality from the programmer.…”

Axiomatic Characterization of Trace Reachability for Concurrent Objects

“…To illustrate the main ideas underlying the program synthesis, we focus in this paper on an asynchronous active (concurrent) object language [3] that features classes, dynamic object creation, and asynchronous method calls which are immediately stored in a FIFO queue of the callee, later to be dequeued for execution by the callee in a run-to-completion mode. Further, each object encapsulates its local state and executes at most one method at a time.…”