Section: Software

Telex

Participants : Marc Shapiro [correspondent] , Lamia Benmouffok, Pierre Sutra, Pierpaolo Cincilla.

Developing write-sharing applications is challenging. Developers must deal with difficult problems such as managing distributed state, disconnection, and conflicts. Telex is an application-independent platform to ease development and to provide guarantees. Telex is guided by application-provided parameters: actions (operations) and constraints (concurrency control statements). Telex takes care of replication and persistence, drives application progress, and ensures that replicas eventually agree on a correct, common state. Telex supports partial replication, i.e., sites only receive operations they are interested in. The main data structure of Telex is a large, replicated, highly dynamic graph; we discuss the engineering trade-offs for such a graph and our solutions. Our novel agreement protocol runs Telex ensures, in the background, that replicas converge to a safe state. We conducted an experimental evaluation of the Telex based on a cooperative calendar application and on benchmarks.

We report on application experience, building a collaborative application for model-oriented software engineering above Telex, in SAC 2011 [50] . Future work includes extending Telex to cloud computing, opportunistic mobile networks, and real-time collaboration, within several ANR projects: PROSE (Section  8.1.5 ), STREAMS (Section  8.1.4 ) and ConcoRDanT (Section  8.1.3 ).

The code is freely available on http://gforge.inria.fr/ under a BSD license.