ABS: A High-Level Modeling Language for Cloud-Aware Programming

Abstract

Cloud technology has become an invaluable tool to the IT business, because of its attractive economic model. Yet, from the programmers' perspective, the development of cloud applications remains a major challenge. In this paper we introduce a programming language that allows Cloud applications to monitor and control their own deployment. Our language originates from the Abstract Behavioral Specification (ABS) language: a high-level object-oriented language for modeling concurrent systems. We extend the ABS language with Deployment Components which abstract over Virtual Machines of the Cloud and which enable any ABS application to distribute itself among multiple Cloud-machines. ABS models are executed by transforming them to distributed-object Haskell code. As a result, we obtain a Cloud-aware programming language which supports a full development cycle including modeling, resource analysis and code generation. Partly funded by the EU project FP7-610582 Envisage. This work was carried out on the Dutch national e-infrastructure with the support of SURF Foundation.

On Futures for Streaming Data in ABS

“…The case study on massive social network simulation has been implemented in Cloud ABS [6], which is a source-to-source transcompiler from ABS code down to Cloud Haskell [12] runnable on distributed machines. Beside a higher level of abstraction at the programming level thanks to our proposed feature, the distributed runtime system provides more than 6× speed-up performance compared to the same implementation without using the feature, presented in [11].…”

“…Moreover, the notion of data streaming abstracts from the specific implementation of ABS. In our case, we make use of the distributed Haskell backend of ABS [6] for the case study on future-based data streams reported in this paper. This paper is organized as follows: a brief description of the ABS programming language is given in Sect.…”

A Formal, Resource Consumption-Preserving Translation of Actors to Haskell

“…Comparison. The described target language is an untyped extract of the canonical ABS-Haskell backend [4], with the main difference being that ABS statements are translated to an AST interpreted by eval function, while the canonical version compiles statements down to native code, which naturally yields faster execution. However, this deep embedding of an AST allows multiple interpretations of the syntax: debug the syntax tree and have an equivalence result.…”

Human-in-the-Loop Simulation of Cloud Services

“…The original Haskell backend of ABS was designed with speed in mind, as well as to offer distributed computing on the cloud [2]. The choice of Haskell was made since it provides language features that closely match those of ABS, and also certain runtime facilities that make the ABS straightforward to implement (e.g.…”