Ambient-Oriented Programming

Ambient references are a novel remote object reference mechanism. Remote object references are “pointers across the network” and are a frequently recurring abstraction in both distributed OO languages and distributed middleware. Ambient references are designed to refer to objects in mobile networks. What exactly constitutes a mobile network and how it differs from traditional, stationary networks is described elsewhere.

One may wonder why new referencing abstractions are required for mobile networks. In order to motivate the need for new referencing abstractions at the language level, we list a number of desirable properties of remote references for mobile networks which current remote referencing abstractions do not offer:

1. Provisional References: remote references should be able to point to remote objects which are “not yet available” in the network. This is founded on the observation that in mobile networks], ambient resources - **Resilience to Partial Failure**: - **Transitory Addressing**: - **Group Communication**: == Design == Ambient references unify two concepts: they are both a peer-to-peer discovery channel //and// an asynchronous communication channel to a remote object. == Example Usage == == Implementation == A detailed explanation of ambient references can be found in [[ftp://prog.vub.ac.be/tech_report/2006/vub-prog-tr-06-07.pdf|this technical report.

Ambient References: Addressing Objects in Mobile Networks. Tom Van Cutsem, Jessie Dedecker, Stijn Mostinckx, Elisa Gonzalez Boix, Theo D'Hondt, Wolfgang De Meuter. In Technical Report VUB-PROG-TR-06-10, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 2006 [ download ]