Section: Overall Objectives

Presentation

The ASCOLA project-team aims at harnessing and developing advanced application structuring mechanisms, and supporting the transformational development of correct large-scale applications as well as their valid evolution throughout their entire life cycle. We apply a language-based approach to achieve this goal, defining new languages in order to represent architectural as well as implementation level abstractions and exploit formal methods to ensure correctness.

Concretely, we investigate expressive aspect languages to modularize crosscutting concerns. Those languages enable sophisticated relationships between execution events to be formulated and manipulated directly at the language level. We study how to reconcile invasive accesses by aspects with strongly encapsulated software entities. Furthermore, we foster the transformational development of implementations from higher-level architectural software representations using domain-specific languages. Finally, we focus on abstractions and development methods for distributed and concurrent systems, in particular flexible and energy-efficient infrastructures.

Our results are subjected to validation in the context of four main application domains: enterprise information systems, service-oriented architectures, cluster/grid, cloud applications, and pervasive systems.