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ContextWorkflow: A Monadic DSL for Compensable and Interruptible Executions

Authors Hiroaki Inoue, Tomoyuki Aotani, Atsushi Igarashi

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Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Software and its engineering → Domain specific languages
Keywords
  • workflow
  • asynchronous exception
  • checkpoint
  • monad
  • embedded domain specific language

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Abstract

Context-aware applications, whose behavior reactively depends on the time-varying status of the surrounding environment - such as network connection, battery level, and sensors - are getting more and more pervasive and important. The term "context-awareness" usually suggests prompt reactions to context changes: as the context change signals that the current execution cannot be continued, the application should immediately abort its execution, possibly does some clean-up tasks, and suspend until the context allows it to restart. Interruptions, or asynchronous exceptions, are useful to achieve context-awareness. It is, however, difficult to program with interruptions in a compositional way in most programming languages because their support is too primitive, relying on synchronous exception handling mechanism such as try-catch.
We propose a new domain-specific language ContextWorkflow for interruptible programs as a solution to the problem. A basic unit of an interruptible program is a workflow, i.e., a sequence of atomic computations accompanied with compensation actions. The uniqueness of ContextWorkflow is that, during its execution, a workflow keeps watching the context between atomic actions and decides if the computation should be continued, aborted, or suspended. Our contribution of this paper is as follows; (1) the design of a workflow-like language with asynchronous interruption, checkpointing, sub-workflows and suspension; (2) a formal semantics of the core language; (3) a monadic interpreter corresponding to the semantics; and (4) its concrete implementation as an embedded domain-specific language in Scala.

Cite As Get BibTex

Hiroaki Inoue, Tomoyuki Aotani, and Atsushi Igarashi. ContextWorkflow: A Monadic DSL for Compensable and Interruptible Executions. In 32nd European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2018). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 109, pp. 2:1-2:33, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2018) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2018.2

Author Details

Hiroaki Inoue
  • Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan
Tomoyuki Aotani
  • School of Computing, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan
Atsushi Igarashi
  • Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan

Funding

This work was supported in part by Kyoto University Design School (Inoue).
  • Inoue, Hiroaki: The current affiliation is Mitsubishi Electric Corporation.

Supplementary Materials

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