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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 under an MIT License!

Read the essence of AmbientTalk in 10 steps

Download IdeAT, our Eclipse plug-in for AmbientTalk.

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 nearby devices in 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 make abstraction from 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 functional, object-oriented kernel language built upon the principles of prototype-based programming (based on Scheme, Self and Smalltalk). 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. Alternatively, glance at the key expressions in the language to get a 60-second overview of the language's design and intents.

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.

Why another programming language?

“What does a high-level language accomplish? It frees a program from much of its accidental complexity. An abstract program consists of conceptual constructs: operations, data types, sequences, and communication. The concrete machine program is concerned with bits, registers, conditions, branches, channels, disks, and such. To the extent that the high-level language embodies the constructs one wants in the abstract program and avoids all lower ones, it eliminates a whole level of complexity that was never inherent in the program at all.” - Frederick Brooks, No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering

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.1278942093.txt.gz · Last modified: 2010/07/12 15:43 (external edit)