License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (CC BY 3.0)
When quoting this document, please refer to the following
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2018.2
URN: urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-92074
URL: http://dagstuhl.sunsite.rwth-aachen.de/volltexte/2018/9207/
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Inoue, Hiroaki ; Aotani, Tomoyuki ; Igarashi, Atsushi

ContextWorkflow: A Monadic DSL for Compensable and Interruptible Executions

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LIPIcs-ECOOP-2018-2.pdf (0.8 MB)

Abstract

Context-aware applications, whose behavior reactively depends on the time-varying status of the surrounding environment - such as network connection, battery level, and sensors - are getting more and more pervasive and important. The term "context-awareness" usually suggests prompt reactions to context changes: as the context change signals that the current execution cannot be continued, the application should immediately abort its execution, possibly does some clean-up tasks, and suspend until the context allows it to restart. Interruptions, or asynchronous exceptions, are useful to achieve context-awareness. It is, however, difficult to program with interruptions in a compositional way in most programming languages because their support is too primitive, relying on synchronous exception handling mechanism such as try-catch.
We propose a new domain-specific language ContextWorkflow for interruptible programs as a solution to the problem. A basic unit of an interruptible program is a workflow, i.e., a sequence of atomic computations accompanied with compensation actions. The uniqueness of ContextWorkflow is that, during its execution, a workflow keeps watching the context between atomic actions and decides if the computation should be continued, aborted, or suspended. Our contribution of this paper is as follows; (1) the design of a workflow-like language with asynchronous interruption, checkpointing, sub-workflows and suspension; (2) a formal semantics of the core language; (3) a monadic interpreter corresponding to the semantics; and (4) its concrete implementation as an embedded domain-specific language in Scala.

BibTeX - Entry

@InProceedings{inoue_et_al:LIPIcs:2018:9207,
  author =	{Hiroaki Inoue and Tomoyuki Aotani and Atsushi Igarashi},
  title =	{{ContextWorkflow: A Monadic DSL for Compensable and Interruptible Executions}},
  booktitle =	{32nd European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming  (ECOOP 2018)},
  pages =	{2:1--2:33},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-079-8},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2018},
  volume =	{109},
  editor =	{Todd Millstein},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl--Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{http://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2018/9207},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-92074},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2018.2},
  annote =	{Keywords: workflow, asynchronous exception, checkpoint, monad, embedded domain specific language}
}

Keywords: workflow, asynchronous exception, checkpoint, monad, embedded domain specific language
Collection: 32nd European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2018)
Issue Date: 2018
Date of publication: 10.07.2018

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