Speaker: Charles Consel, INRIA
Title: Architecturing Distributed Applications 

Abstract:
 
Distributed applications involving a variety of interacting networked
entities are becoming increasingly prevalent. Various tools and
software layers have been developed to assist in programming these
interactions such as CORBA, DCOM and Java RMI. Yet, these tools and
software layers mostly consider entities individually, leaving out the
global consistency of the distributed application. Consistency checks
are rarely performed at compile time, deferring them to run time.

In this talk, we present a lightweight architecture definition
language over Java for statically specifying the categories of
entities that are rele- vant to a given distributed computing domain
and how they are allowed to interact with each other. This
specification is used to generate a ded- icated programming framework,
providing boilerplate functionalities to developers and performing
global consistency verifications. Our approach is implemented and has
been validated on a variety of distributed com- puting domains.

(Joint work with Wilfried Jouve, Damien Cassou, Julien Mercadal,
and Julia Lawall)


Bio:

Charles Consel is a professor of Computer Science at
ENSEIRB/University of Bordeaux.  He leads the Phoenix group at
INRIA. He has been designing and implementing Domain-Specific
Languages (DSLs) for a variety of areas including device drivers,
programmable routers, stream processing, and telephony services. 
These DSLs have been validated with real-sized applications and 
showed measureable benefits compared to applications written in
general-purpose languages.  His research interests include programming
languages, software engineering and operating systems.