High-Level Networking With Mobile Code And First Order AND-Continuations

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel framework for high-level networking using mobile code and first-order continuations, enabling dynamic code migration, efficient execution, and flexible distributed logic programming for applications like web servers and mobile agents.

Contribution

It introduces a new scheme for moving live code between distributed processes using first-order continuations and lazy code fetching, enhancing flexibility and performance in networked applications.

Findings

Code migration with continuations is efficient and flexible.

Dynamic recompilation improves code speed hierarchy.

Framework supports programmable web components and mobile agents.

Abstract

We describe a scheme for moving living code between a set of distributed processes coordinated with unification based Linda operations, and its application to building a comprehensive Logic programming based Internet programming framework. Mobile threads are implemented by capturing first order continuations in a compact data structure sent over the network. Code is fetched lazily from its original base turned into a server as the continuation executes at the remote site. Our code migration techniques, in combination with a dynamic recompilation scheme, ensure that heavily used code moves up smoothly on a speed hierarchy while volatile dynamic code is kept in a quickly updatable form. Among the examples, we describe how to build programmable client and server components (Web servers, in particular) and mobile agents.