Re: Yet Another Choreography Specification

Steve Ross-Talbot wrote,
> I know Assaf has some experience of both pi and join calculus. I
> could probably get Prof Robin Milner involved so that we can
> understand more fully the relationship between the requirements that
> we write down and the expressive power of pi-calculus. I am sure that
> we would also be able to handle the blend of pi and PetriNets and
> possibly show that one subsumes the other.

Apologies in advance for the slightly off-topic content of the post.

The Java Isolation API[1] currently being developed in the Java 
Community Process as JSR-121 and (hopefully) scheduled for inclusion in 
J2SE 1.5 has some distinctly Pi-ish aspects ... specifically the 
ability to pass communication channels across communication channels 
(ie. mobility).

Whilst this isn't directly relevant to ws-chor, it's just possible that 
people could use it to get a flavour of Pi idioms without having to go 
through the learning curve that'd be needed to start working with one 
of the full-blown Pi-derived languages, eg. Pict[2] or Nomadic Pict[3].

The motivation might also be of interest. We wanted to provide a high 
degree of communication flexibility between isolated computations with 
the minimum of API and supporting infrastructure. Mobility struck us as 
being close to ideal in that it allows for the construction of 
arbitrary communication topologies on the basis of a tiny number of 
very simple primitives.

With any luck we'll have a reference implementation available for public 
download in the not too distant future (I've got to finish it first ;-) 
and if there's any interest, I'd be happy to post an announcement here.

FWIW, Pete Soper (the EG lead) and I are hoping to present an informal 
paper on the relationships between JSR-121 and Pi to the workshop on 
"Formal Techniques for Java-like Programs" at ECOOP 2003.

[1] http://jcp.org/aboutJava/communityprocess/review/jsr121/index.html
[2] http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/papers/pict/Html/Pict.html
[3] http://lsewww.epfl.ch/~pawel/nomadicpict.html

Cheers,


Miles

Received on Friday, 31 January 2003 06:52:16 UTC