Year: 2001
Type: dissertation
Abstract: : Increasing demand for Internet-based applications motivates the development of programming models that ease their implementation. With the research presented in this thesis, we aim to improve understanding of what is involved when programming applications for the global network, and in particular the Web. We are primarily concerned with the development of language-level programming abstractions that address issues arising from the failure and performance properties of the Web. Frequent failure and unpredictable performance are ever-present aspects of any Web computation, so we must bring the properties of the Web into the semantic domain of our program systems. Our primary goal is to enable concise and intuitive expression of failure semantics in the context of concurrency, which is necessary for efficient Web computation given the large overhead in every network access. The main scientific contribution of this thesis is the development of a Web programming model for which a major design goal is the integration of domain concepts, failure interpretation, concurrency, and a mechanism for flow of control after failure. Our model is the first to successfully achieve a clean integration. We develop a programming language called Focus, which incorporates two complimentary abstractions. Persistent relative observables allow reasoning about the dynamic behaviour of computations in the context of past behaviours. Examples of observables are the rate, elapsed time, and success probability of
Author: Keith Sibson
Language: English
Subfield: Software
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3014769056