Ambient transactors

• Authors: Christophe Scholliers;Tom Van Cutsem;Wolfgang De Meuter
• Venue: Proceedings of the 6th international workshop on Middleware for pervasive and ad-hoc computing
• Year: 2008

Extensions to the actor model have been proposed to ease the development of mobile ad hoc applications. However, programming in the actor model is still difficult as it does not provide abstractions to synchronously coordinate multiple actors. Thus, when programmers want to coordinate two or more actors they have to do it by hand. Additionally, programmers need to write failure recovery code for failures caused by the concurrent access to the actors they are using. Coding this manually is error prone and might even be not feasible. We propose a language abstraction based on software transactional memory to coordinate actors. We show that the integration of software transactional memory with the actor model makes writing failure recovery code superfluous. Moreover, we show that our system even handles those cases where manually writing the failure recovery code is not feasible.