Colloquia

How Should We Program the Internet?

John Field
IBM T.J.Watson Research Center

November 29, 2007
JEC 3117 - 4:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Refreshments at 3:30 p.m.

Abstract:

Increasingly, software is being built as loosely-coupled collections of distributed components interacting over the internet, glued together by systems software such as databases, messaging systems, web servers, and browsers. Many such applications are also "inter-organizational", combining components written in and running in distinct administrative domains. While the trend toward internetworked applications is inexorable, the programming models we are using to build such applications were largely designed for monolithic, freestanding applications. In this talk, I will discuss some of the reasons why programming models should evolve to better support internetworked applications, and enumerate some of the distinguishing features of such applications. I will then describe recent work on the Reactor model, a simple kernel programming model which is intended to explore integration of front-end "presentation logic", back-end "business logic", and data access in a single distributed language that supports both synchronous and asynchronous component composition. This work is joint with M.-C. Marinescu and C. Stefansen.

Bio:

John Field is a Research Staff Member at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center, where he manages the Advanced Programming Tools Group. He received a BSE degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Princeton University, and MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science from Cornell University. His research interests include static analysis and verification of programs, tools for program understanding and transformation, program semantics and logics, and programming language design. His current research projects include algorithms for extraction of logical data models from legacy applications, and a programming models for internet-scale distributed applications. In addition to his research activities, he has contributed to the development of three IBM programming products.

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For more information:

John Field's Web Page

Last updated: November 21, 2007