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Welcome to our website on Ambient-Oriented Programming, a novel programming paradigm geared towards promoting and programming spontaneous interactions between different mobile and/or embedded devices.

:at:atlogo.jpg This webpage is also the home of AmbientTalk, our experimental programming language to develop applications for software running on mobile ad hoc networks. The current implementation of AmbientTalk is relatively stable. The best way to get started is to download the language and to read the tutorial.

AmbientTalk is now open-sourced on Google Code!

What is AmbientTalk about?

Ambient-Oriented programming is a programming paradigm whose properties are derived from the characteristics of hardware platforms for mobile computing. Mobile hardware devices are often provided with wireless networks facilities, allowing them to engage in collaboration with their environment. However, the autonomous nature of these devices as well as the volatile connections over their wireless infrastructure has its repercussions on the software that employs them. The basic assumption of the Ambient-Oriented Programming paradigm is that languages should incorporate possible network failures at the heart of their programming model.

From this observation, several characteristics of programming languages can be derived. Our own experimental language, AmbientTalk, differs from most traditional languages because:

  • It employs a purely event-driven concurrency framework, founded on actors.
  • It abandons the RPC abstraction in favor of asynchronous, non-blocking message passing. Because the system automatically buffers such messages while the receiver of the message is disconnected, the programmer can abstract over temporary network failures by default!
  • It has built-in programming language constructs for objects to discover one another in the local ad hoc network. Peer-to-peer service discovery is built into the language.
  • It features a dynamic OO kernel language built upon the principles of prototype-based programming. More importantly, the kernel language is reflective and hence extensible from within the language itself.

Check out the introduction to AmbientTalk for a hands-on example showing you the benefits in actual code.

AmbientTalk is not our only research artifact. There is also CRIME, a data-driven programming language which explores the logic programming paradigm to tackle similar coordination issues in mobile ad hoc networks.

Contact

The AmbientTalk mailing list, for questions and general information on AmbientTalk: . If you want to contact any one of us personally, please see the People pages for personal contact details.

Further Reading

If you're interested in the Ambient-oriented Programming paradigm in general, check out the papers on AmOP page. The seminal OOPSLA2005 Onward! paper pretty much sums up our earliest musings on AmOP. A year later, at ECOOP2006, we refined these ideas and applied them to our first AmbientTalk prototype.

If you're interested in the AmbientTalk programming language, check out the papers on AmbientTalk page. The ECOOP2006 paper is the first paper describing AmbientTalk in-depth. However, since mid-2006, the language has been extensively revised. A good starting point for reading about the revised language is the SCCC2007 paper.

Research Topics

start.1210753631.txt.gz · Last modified: 2008/05/14 10:28 (external edit)