A high-level symbolic language for distributed Web programming

We present a flexible language framework (DLP) for distributed active object configurations that facilitates the construction of networked software systems for symbolic application domains on the Web. The language DLP consists of a number of high-level modeling and multi-language collaboration concepts, suitable for architecting distributed object systems: active multi-threaded symbolic as well as imperative objects are the basic building blocks for the construction of distributed software systems. Symbolic autonomous objects cooperate by means of high-level synchronous or asynchronous conditional communication primitives and the current underlying run-time system supports incremental dynamic loading and linking of objects at arbitrary nodes in an Internet environment. Innovating aspects of our current research are the integration of symbolic processing, imperative processing and object distribution, combined with several object collaboration services for distributed processing on the Web. For a realistic evaluation of the language concepts we've used a prototype system to reimplement all aspects of the system in DLP itself, including the compiler-frontend, compiler-backend and the object collaboration services.