Pantaxou: a Domain-Specific Language for Developing Safe Coordination Services

Julien Mercadal (1, 2) , Nicolas Palix (1, 2) , Charles Consel (1, 2) , Julia Lawall (3)

1 LaBRI - Laboratoire Bordelais de Recherche en Informatique
2 Phoenix - Programming Language Technology For Communication Services
3 DIKU - Department of Computer Science [Copenhagen]

Coordinating entities in a networked environment has always been a significant challenge for software developers. In recent years, however, it has become even more difficult, because devices have increasingly rich capabilities, combining an ever larger range of technologies (networking, multimedia, sensors, etc.). To address this challenge, we propose a language-based approach to covering the life-cycle of applications coordinating networked entities. Our approach covers the characterization of the networked environment, the specification of coordination applications, the verification of a networked environment and its deployment. It is carried out in practice by a domain-specific language, named Pantaxou. This paper presents the domain-specific language Pantaxou, dedicated to the development of applications for networked heterogeneous entities. Pantaxou has been used to specify a number of coordination scenarios in areas ranging from home automation to telecommunications. The language semantics has been formally defined and a compiler has been developed. The compiler verifies the coherence of a coordination scenario and generates coordination code in Java.

Domaines: Génie logiciel [cs.SE]

Julien Mercadal, Nicolas Palix, Charles Consel, Julia Lawall. Pantaxou: a Domain-Specific Language for Developing Safe Coordination Services. Seventh International Conference on Generative Programming and Component Engineering, Oct 2008, Nashville, United States. pp.149-160. ⟨inria-00333637⟩