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ECCOSIC:

An Efficient Concurrent Constraint Framework for Symbolic and Internet/WWW Computing

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CLIPThe CLIP Group at DIA / FIM / Technical University of Madrid (UPM)
LLDAPThe LLDAP Group at CS / New Mexico State University (NMSU)

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This project provides travel funds for the collaboration between our two groups on the development of an efficient concurrent constraint framework for symbolic and Internet/WWW computing.

Motivation:

In recent years, Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW) have become the primary medium for information exchange. In fact, in the future, all of computing will be centered around the WWW. The WWW programming tools that are being currently developed, in our opinion, are still not powerful and user-friendly enough. The languages currently used (Java, Perl, etc.) have very limited support for symbolic computing. Also, they either have limited support for expressing concurrency, making them unsuitable, for example, for programming servers (which require concurrency to properly handle multiple client connections), or concurrency is supported at a very low-level (e.g., Java), requiring detailed knowledge of low level primitives on the part of the programmer. In short, current frameworks have poor or no support for two key ingredients---symbolic manipulation and concurrency---needed for effective and efficient WWW programming. On the other hand Logic Programming (LP) and Constraint Logic Programming (CLP) have been proved particularly successful tools for high-level symbolic and numeric information processing, dealing with combinatorial problems, natural language processing, and knowledge representation and manipulation, etc. Furthermore, it is our belief that these languages can support very high-level notions of concurrency and synchronization. Thus, studying the use of LP/CLP technology in developing applications which have to operate over the Internet is, in our opinion, highly promising.

Scientific objectives:

The main objective of this project is to develop an integrated advanced tool for programming applications distributed over the Internet which offers powerful symbolic processing capabilities, a high level of abstraction of concurrency, communication and synchronization, and transparent exploitation of parallelism. We will base this framework on constraint programming, because it offers a unique blend of all these features. The resulting system will be developed in four stages: (i) a constraint language will be extended with appropriate support for WWW programming; (ii) an engine for parallel and distributed execution of WWW programs (written in the extended constraint language) will be developed; (iii) a static analyzer and compiler will be developed to support parallel/distributed execution; and, (iv) finally, the whole system will be tested on a collection of advanced WWW applications. Our system will also be usable for general-purpose symbolic computing (e.g. AI and decision support applications).

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Manuel Hermenegildo
Last modified: Tue Aug 3 13:13:53 1999