ECCOSIC:
An Efficient Concurrent Constraint Framework for Symbolic and
Internet/WWW Computing
The CLIP Group at DIA /
FIM /
Technical University of Madrid (UPM)
The LLDAP Group at CS /
New Mexico State University (NMSU)
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).
Manuel Hermenegildo
Last modified: Tue Aug 3 13:13:53 1999