Section: Other Grants and Activities

National Projects

ANR CESSA: “Compositional evolution of secure services with aspects”

Participants : Mario Südholt (coordinator), Hervé Grall.

The project CESSA is an (industrial) ANR project running for 36 months. It was accepted in June 2009 for funding amounting to 290 KEUR for ASCOLA from December 2009 on. Four partners collaborate within the project that is coordinated by ASCOLA:

• INRIA project-team ASCOLA, located at Ecole des Mines, Nantes, France,

• a security research team from Eurecom, Sophia-Antipolis, France,

• the Security and Trust team from SAP Labs, located at Sophia-Antipolis,

• IS2T, an innovative start-up company developing middleware technologies located at Nantes.

The project deals with security in service-oriented architectures. See Sect.  4.2 for details about the subject. The academic partners are highly complementary with respect to the scientific methods and techniques that are to be investigated as part of the CESSA proposal : aspect-orientation and formalization for ASCOLA, security for Eurecom. The industrial partners are also highly complementary as to their business domains, size and types of customers. As a consequence, they contribute with two well-distinct real-world use cases to the proposal: SAP propose large-scale web-based enterprise information systems while IS2T will extend its specially-tailored JVM-based execution environment.

ANR FLFS: “Languages family for systems family”

Participants : Pierre Cointe, Kelly Garcés.

Traditionally, software development does not rely on an in-depth knowledge of the target domain. Instead, domain-specific knowledge is integrated in the software development process in an ad hoc and partial fashion, without much formal basis or tools. In doing so, software systems are tackled in isolation, making conceptual or implementation factorization difficult. Yet, it is fundamental to observe that programs always belong to a family. In this family, they share commonalities and expose specific variations.

From a software development viewpoint, a program family represents a domain of expertise, that is, a vocabulary, notations, rules and protocols that are specific to a domain. For example, the telephony domain consists of a set of concepts, rules, protocols and interfaces that represent a precise framework to be used for the development of telephony services.

Our goal is to place domain expertise at the centre of the software development process. It is aimed to lift the current limitations of software engineering regarding large scale software production, robustness, reliability, maintenance and evolution of software components. Our key innovation is to introduce a software development process parametrized with respect to a specific domain of expertise. This process covers all the stages of software development and combines the following three emerging approaches:

• Domain-specific modelling, also known as model engineering;

• Domain-specific languages, in contrast with general-purpose languages;

• Generative programming and in particular aspect-oriented programming as a means to transform models and programs.

Our partners are the AtlanMod (J. Bézivin) and Phoenix (C. Consel) INRIA teams. The duration of the project was 36 months, ending December 2009. FLFS' main results, including the AML DSL (http://wiki.eclipse.org/AML ) to express matching strategies which compute mappings between models, will be presented at the ANR STIC 2010 conference (http://colloque-stic.org/ ).

ASCOLA's funding part amounts to 70 KEUR. The Web page is :http://flfs.emn.fr .

ANR SelfXL: “Self-management of complex and large scale system”

Participants : Jean-Marc Menaud, Thomas Ledoux, Adrien Lèbre.

The SelfXL project is an (industrial) ANR/ARPEGE project running for 36 months. It was accepted in July 2008 for funding amounting to 315 KEUR (ASCOLA only) from January 2009 on.

The SelfXL project aims at investigating abstractions and implementation techniques (language mechanisms, runtime infrastructures...) for complex and large-scale autonomic systems. The scope of this project encompasses any system that has a high software complexity (distributed, size of code, etc.) and is large-scale in terms of size and heterogeneity of resources and software. Systems to be targeted range from cluster computing to embedded systems, including legacy software.

Two main issues will be addressed by SelfXL: How to implement administration policies for complex system and how to coordinate administration policies in a complex system? Regarding the first issue, SelfXL proposes to explore the DSL programming approach, i.e., designing specific languages for defining specific kinds of administration policies (self-repair, self-optimization, self-protection). The general use of DSLs would ensure the correctness of the policies.

We propose to design a decision module based on Constraints Programming (CP). As the Rules Based Systems (RBS) or the Event Condition Action (ECA) approach, CP belongs to the declarative paradigm but does not share the major drawback of the other approaches when some rules are simultaneously asserted. This is the case when there is an overlap between the domain or the target of rules.

Finally, we propose to extend the Jasmine autonomic administration platform (http://wiki.jasmine.objectweb.org ) for supporting a decentralized and hierarchical infrastructure to address the large-scale administration.

ADT Galaxy

Participants : Thomas Ledoux, Mahmoud Ben Hassine.

The technology development action (ADT) Galaxy (http://galaxy.gforge.inria.fr ) has been created in order to leverage INRIA's multiple software contributions to the field of SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture). The objective of the Galaxy project is to pre-assemble technological bricks from various teams and projects, and to prepare them to be transferred through the open source software channel.

Galaxy makes it possible to design, deploy, run, monitor systems, following concepts and paradigms inherited from service-oriented, business process and dynamic architectures, and to offer a set of management functions for agile and dynamic systems. Most of the Galaxy technologies are compliant with the Eclipse and the SCA standards. The INRIA technologies Fractal, FraSCAti and GCM-ProActive are the technological drivers of this ADT.

From an engineering point of view, the ASCOLA project-team provides the DSL FScript and the monitoring service WildCAT as sub-components for building the target agile platform. From a research point of view, we will participate to the definition of a new language to dynamically manipulate adaptive distributed SOA-based systems.

This year, we have presented a first prototype at the JavaOne 2009 conference and proposed an extension of WildCAT for the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF)[27] .

Contributors to this ADT are mainly research project-teams, including ADAM, ECOO, OASIS, ASCOLA, TUVALU, SARDES and TRISKELL. The ADT lasts 28 months: the kickoff was held on July 3rd, 2008 and the project is planned to end in October 2010. The galaxy ADT is led and managed by the TUVALU project-team.