After reading the latest VPRI tech report "Steps Toward the
Reinvention of Programming" I was compelled to revisit the Declarative
Networking research by Boon Thau Loo and others. The claim is put
forth that by specifying network protocols declaratively rather than
imperatively, major gains can be realized in three areas:
- ease of programming (more concise, understandable, and modular code)
- optimizability (applying database optimizations to network queries)
- balancing extensibility with security (eg: much more secure than
unconstrained mobile code)
The first point is probably the most salient to VPRI's research
agenda. One impressive example is a factor of 100x reduction in the
number of lines of code to implement the Chord DHT, compared to C++.
The concise implementation required only 48 rules of NDlog (the Prolog-
like language designed for declarative networking).
Unfortunately, I don't have time to work on this, but I thought that
it might be of interest to Viewpoints or others in the community.
Perhaps now that it's Google Summer of Code time, one of the grad
students from Berkeley or Penn might be enticed to port P2 to COLA
(instead of the yucky lex and yak that the NDlog parser is currently
written in); it would be a nice encore to the COLA TCP implementation
described in VPRI's new tech report (http://vpri.org/pdf/steps_TR-2007-008.pdf
).
BTW, I found the best paper on the topic is Loo's Ph.D. dissertation,
entitled "The Design and Implementation of Declarative Networks". The
conference papers were too terse for me (but maybe not if you are more
familiar with database theory than I am).
Josh
_______________________________________________
fonc mailing list
[email protected]
http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
