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JCoBox: Generalizing Active Objects to Concurrent Components

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ECOOP 2010 – Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2010)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 6183))

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Abstract

Concurrency in object-oriented languages is still waiting for a satisfactory solution. For many application areas, standard mechanisms like threads and locks are too low level and have shown to be error-prone and not modular enough. Lately the actor paradigm has regained attention as a possible solution to concurrency in OOLs.

We propose JCoBox: a Java extension with an actor-like concurrency model based on the notion of concurrently running object groups, so-called coboxes. Communication is based on asynchronous method calls with standard objects as targets. Cooperative multi-tasking within coboxes allows for combining active and reactive behavior in a simple and safe way. Futures and promises lead to a data-driven synchronization of tasks.

This paper describes the concurrency model, the formal semantics, and the implementation of JCoBox, and shows that the performance of the implementation is comparable to state-of-the-art actor-based language implementations for the JVM.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Kaiserslautern,  

    Jan Schäfer & Arnd Poetzsch-Heffter

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  1. Jan Schäfer
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  2. Arnd Poetzsch-Heffter
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  1. Software Languages Lab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 2, 1050, Brussels, Belgium

    Theo D’Hondt

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Schäfer, J., Poetzsch-Heffter, A. (2010). JCoBox: Generalizing Active Objects to Concurrent Components. In: D’Hondt, T. (eds) ECOOP 2010 – Object-Oriented Programming. ECOOP 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6183. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-14107-2_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-14107-2_13

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