Section: Overall Objectives

Presentation

The ASCOLA project-team, created on 1 Jan. 2009, aims at harnessing and developing advanced application structuring mechanisms, and supporting the transformational development of correct large-scale applications as well as their valid evolution throughout their entire life cycle. We apply a language-based approach to achieve this goal, defining new languages in order to represent architectural as well as implementation level abstractions and exploit formal semantics, static analysis of properties, etc., of these languages to ensure correctness.

Concretely, we investigate expressive aspect languages to modularize crosscutting concerns. Those languages enable sophisticated relationships between execution events to be formulated and manipulated directly at the language level. We study how to reconcile invasive accesses by aspects with strongly encapsulated software entities by harnessing composition languages that manipulate expressive, in particular non-regular, interaction protocols. Furthermore, we foster the transformational development of implementations from higher-level architectural software representations using domain-specific languages that manipulate architectural patterns. Finally, we focus on abstractions and development methods for distributed and concurrent applications.

Our results are subjected to validation in the context of four main application domains: enterprise information systems, service-oriented architectures, cluster and grid applications, and pervasive systems.

In 2009, an action on energy efficiency in large scale distributed architectures, from the system to the application level, has been created. This action involves three permanent staff: Adrien Lèbre, Thomas Ledoux and Jean-Marc Menaud. A first result concerns the national price on Green IT ”Prix de la croissance verte numérique” (http://www.prixdelacroissancevertenumerique.eu ) delivered for the work done around the Entropy framework.