Papers on AmbientTalk

Below you can find a number of selected scientific publications about the AmbientTalk programming language.

T. Van Cutsem, E. Gonzalez Boix, C. Scholliers, A. Lombide Carreton, D. Harnie, K. Pinte, W. De Meuter. AmbientTalk: programming responsive mobile peer-to-peer applications with actors. In Computer Languages,Systems and Structures, Volume 40, issues 3–4, Pages 112-136, 2014. [ download ]

This journal paper provides a thorough overview of the AmbientTalk/2 language. The first part of the paper explains the key language features by example. The second part of the paper provides a precise operational semantics of the core language.

T. Van Cutsem, S. Mostinckx, E. Gonzalez Boix, J. Dedecker, W. De Meuter. AmbientTalk: object-oriented event-driven programming in Mobile Ad hoc Networks. In Proceedings of the XXVI International Conference of the Chilean Computer Science Society, SCCC 2007, November 2007, Iquique, Chile. [ download ]

This paper gives a general overview of the AmbientTalk/2 language and explains the rationale behind its concurrent and distributed language design. It is a good start for people who are completely new to the language. This paper does build upon the ECOOP2006 paper on Ambient-oriented Programming, but can also be read stand-alone.

T. Van Cutsem. Ambient References: Object Designation in Mobile Ad hoc Networks. PhD Dissertation, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, May 2008. [ download ]

This PhD Dissertation gives an in-depth account of the AmbientTalk language (cf. chapters 4 and 5). Chapter 5 in particular discusses AmbientTalk's reflective facilities. Note that the dissertation is not written in a tutorial-style, so it may not be the most suitable publication for learning about AmbientTalk.

T. Van Cutsem, S. Mostinckx, W. De Meuter. Linguistic Symbiosis between Event Loop Actors and Threads. In Computer Languages, Systems and Structures, Elsevier, 2008. [ download ] (the precursor to this article accepted at the 2007 international conference on dynamic languages can be downloaded here).

This paper is about AmbientTalk's “language symbiosis” with Java. In other words, it explains how AmbientTalk programs can interface with other code running on the JVM. In particular, we discuss the interplay between AmbientTalk event loops and Java threads. The paper briefly describes AmbientTalk, but it is not recommended as the first paper to read about the language.

S. Mostinckx, T. Van Cutsem, S. Timbermont, E. Tanter. Mirages: Behavioral Intercession in a Mirror-based Architecture. In Proceedings of the third Dynamic Languages Symposium, co-located with OOPSLA 2007, October 2007, Montreal, Canada. [ download ]

This paper is about the reflective architecture of AmbientTalk. If you're interested in the design rationale behind AmbientTalk's metaobject protocol, this paper is for you. The AmbientTalk language is briefly described, but it's not recommended to read this paper first if you're new to AmbientTalk.

S. Mostinckx, T. Van Cutsem, S. Timbermont, E. Gonzalez Boix, E. Tanter, W. De Meuter. Mirror-based reflection in AmbientTalk. Software: Practice & Experience, 2008. [ published online ]

This paper describes AmbientTalk's metaobject protocol in detail, for both objects as well as actors. It is an extension of the above paper, providing a comprehensive description of the entire reflective API.

E. Gonzalez Boix, T. Van Cutsem, J. Vallejos, W. De Meuter, T. Dhondt. A Leasing Model to Deal with Partial Failures in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks. Proceedings of TOOLS EUROPE 2009, from LNBIP, vol.33, eds. Manuel Oriol and Bertrand Meyer, Springer-Verlag. [ download ]

This paper describes AmbientTalk's support for dealing with partial failures through the use of Leasing. Leasing enables time-based memory management of remote object references and published objects.

T. Van Cutsem, A. Bergel, S. Ducasse, W. De Meuter. Adding State and Visibility Control to Traits using Lexical Nesting. In Proceedings of the 23rd European Conference on Object-oriented Programming (ECOOP), from Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol.5653, eds. Sophia Drossopoulou, Springer-Verlag, 2009. [ download ]

The paper describes AmbientTalk's support for traits. Traits enable flexible composition of objects. An operational semantics is introduced for the sequential subset of AmbientTalk to model trait composition.