Inactive.
This ongoing project aims to combine several dimensions of programming language technology into an infrastructure to better support the recent trends in software development:
Interactions between different parts of one application are increasingly complex, which poses challenges on the design of encapsulated entities, such as modules, components and objects, to model these interactions.
Software is increasingly developed collaboratively, and runs distributedly.
Software project management has become increasingly complex, with intertwined goals and stages spanning from separate compilation, static linking, version control and dynamic updating.
Security is a crucial concern in an environment lacking of universal trust.
New application domains, such as sensor networks, are not particularly well-supported by traditional language models.
A general thread of the Ab Initio project is to design well-encapuslated programming entities to best facilate their ability to interact in diversified fashions, such as static linking, dynamic linking and cross-computation communications. We have designed Cells for component programming, Assemblages for module systems, and Classages for object-oriented programming. This project is now a collaboration between JHU and SUNY Binghamton.
Yu David Liu, Scott Smith. Pedigree Types. International Workshop on Aliasing, Confinement and Ownership in Object-Oriented Programming (IWACO). Paphos, Cyprus. July 2008. Slides.
Pedigree Types are an intuitive ownership type system requiring minimal programmer annotations. Reusing the vocabulary of human genealogy, Pedigree Types programmers can qualify any object reference with a pedigree – a child, sibling, parent, grandparent, etc – to indicate what relationship the object being referred to has with the referant on the standard ownership tree, following the owners-as-dominators convention. Such a qualifier serves as a heap shape constraint that must hold at run time and is enforced statically. Pedigree child captures the intention of encapsulation, i.e. ownership: the modified object reference is ensured not to escape the boundary of its parent. Among existing ownership type systems, Pedigree Types are closest to Universe Types. The former can be viewed as extending the latter with a more general form of pedigree modifiers, so that the relationship between any pair of objects on the aforementioned ownership tree can be named and – more importantly – inferred. We use a constraint-based type system which is proved sound via subject reduction. Other technical originalities include a polymorphic treatment of pedigrees not explicitly specified by programmers, and use of linear diophantine equations in type constraints to enforce the hierarchy.
Yu David Liu and Scott Smith. A Formal Framework for Component Deployment. In Proceedings of the 21st Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA’06). Portland, Oregon, USA, October 2006. Slides.
Software deployment is a complex process, and industrial-strength frameworks such as .NET, Java, and CORBA all provide explicit support for component deployment. However, these frameworks are not built around fundamental principles as much as they are engineering efforts closely tied to particulars of the respective systems. Here we aim to elucidate the fundamental principles of software deployment, in a platform-independent manner. Issues that need to be addressed include deployment unit design, when, where and how to wire components together, versioning, version dependencies, and hot-deployment of components. We define the application buildbox as the place where software is developed and deployed, and define a formal Labelled Transition System (LTS) on the buildbox with transitions for deployment operations that include build, install, ship, and update. We establish formal properties of the LTS, including the fact that if a component is shipped with a certain version dependency, then at run time that dependency must be satisfied with a compatible version. Our treatment of deployment is both platform- and vendor-independent, and we show how it models the core mechanisms of the industrial-strength deployment frameworks.
Xiaoqi Lu and Scott Smith. A Microkernel Virtual Machine: Building Security with Clear Interfaces. In PLAS 2006, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Slides.
In this paper we propose a novel microkernel-based virtual machine (µKVM), a new code-based security framework with a simple and declarative security architecture. The main design goals of the µKVM are to put a clear, inviolable programming interface between different codebases or security components, and to limit the size of the trusted codebase in the spirit of a microkernel. Security policies are enforced solely on the interface because all data must explicitly pass through the inviolable interface. The architecture of the µKVM effectively removes the need for expensive runtime stack inspection, and applies the principle of least privilege to both library and application code elegantly and efficiently. We have implemented a prototype of the proposed µKVM. A series of benchmarks show that the prototype preserves the original functionality of Java and compares favorably with the J2SDK performance-wise.
Yu David Liu and Scott Smith. Interaction-Based Programming with Classages. In Proceedings of the 20th Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA’05), San Diego, California, USA, October 2005. Slides.
This paper presents Classages, a novel interaction-centric object-oriented language. Classes and objects in Classages are fully encapsulated, with explicit interfaces for all interactions they might be involved in. The design of Classages touches upon a wide range of language design topics, including encapsulation, object relationship representation, and object confinement. An encoding of Java’s OO model in Classages is provided, showing how standard paradigms are supported. A prototype Classages compiler is described.
Yu David Liu and Scott Smith. Modules with Interfaces for Dynamic Linking and Communication. In Proceedings of the 18th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP’04), Oslo, Norway, June 2004. Slides.
Module systems are well known as a means for giving clear interfaces for the static linking of code. This paper shows how adding explicit interfaces to modules for 1) dynamic linking and 2) cross-computation communication can increase the declarative nature of modules, and build a stronger foundation for language-based security and version control. We term these new modules Assemblages. We additionally develop a sound constraint-based type system particularly suited to a module system supporting bounded type parametricity, cross-module type recursion, and polymorphic type binding during dynamic linking and cross-computation communication.
Ran Rinat and Scott Smith. Modular Internet Programming with Cells. In Proceedings of the 16th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP’02), Málaga, Spain, June 2002. Slides.
The success of Java in recent years is largely due to its targeting as a language for the Internet. Many of the network-related features of Java however are not part of the core language design. In this paper we focus on the design of a more parsimonious Internet programming language, which supports network integration smoothly and coherently as part of its core specification. The key idea is to center these extensions around the unified notion of a cell. Cells are deployable containers of objects and code, which may import (plugin) and export (plugout) classes and operations. They may be dynamically linked and unlinked, locally or across the network. Cells may be dynamically loaded, unloaded, copied, and moved, and serve as units of security. At first approximation, cells can be thought of as a hybrid between modules and components. Here we concentrate on the design of JCells, a language which builds cells on top of the fundamental Java notions of class, object, and virtual machine.
Yu David Liu and Scott Smith. A Component Security Infrastructure. Foundations of Computer Security (FCS’02), Copenhagen, Denmark, July 2002. Slides.
This paper defines a security infrastructure for access control at the component level of programming language design. Distributed components are an ideal place to define and enforce significant security policies, because components are large entities that often define the political boundaries of computation. Also, rather than building a security infrastructure from scratch, we build on a standard one, the SDSI/SPKI security infrastructure.
Ran Rinat and Scott Smith. The Cell Project: Component Technology for the Internet. Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Language Mechanisms for Programming Software Components, October 2001.
Ran Rinat and Scott Smith. The Cell Project: Component Technology for the Internet. Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Component-Oriented Programming, Budapest, Hungary, June 2001.
Yu David Liu and Scott Smith and Andreas Terzis. A High-level Language for Sensor Networks.
In this paper we describe Ensemble, a proposed language framework for sensor network programming. Our goal is to provide a programming framework to scientists and engineers that will allow them to directly code sensor network applications, without the need for expertise in low-level device programming. The key concepts in Ensemble are high-level communication protocol connectors, and the ability for systems programmers to define new communication protocols as metaprotocol extensions.
Xiaoqi Lu and Scott Smith. A Secure Microkernel Virtual Machine.
In this paper, we develop a novel microkernel-based virtual machine, the μKVM. It is a microkernel architecture because the size of the trusted system codebase is greatly reduced in comparison to VM’s such as the Java Virtual Machine. The μKVM kernel manages sensitive resources such as I/O, and implements a minimal set of low-level system operations. System libraries are implemented outside the kernel, and run in user mode. All interactions between the kernel and applications are declared on explicit interfaces, and security policies are also enforced at these interfaces. We test our architecture in a μKVM prototype developed for Java and show how the microkernel architecture supports the existing functionality of the J2SDK. The prototype is benchmarked, and the results show that our implementation compares favorably with the J2SDK and so the architecture does not appear to be a burden on running time.
Yu David Liu and Ran Rinat and Scott Smith. Component Assemblies and Component Runtimes.
This paper proposes a component programming language that supports an integrated notion of both compile-time and run-time component. The centerpiece of this paper is the static, compile time notion of assembly, complementing our previous work on the dynamic, runtime notion of cell. An assembly is a declarative, stateless piece of code that facilitates code combination. It offers explicit typed interfaces to outsiders, called linkers, which can be used to link smaller assemblies into bigger, compound assemblies. Each assembly may in turn be loaded at run-time, producing a cell in the runtime environment. A cell is a dynamic, stateful component that interacts with other cells via explicit runtime interfaces. Thus, the static assemblies and the dynamic cells are fully integrated.