JCoBox: generalizing active objects to concurrent components

  • Authors:
  • Jan Schäfer;Arnd Poetzsch-Heffter

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Kaiserslautern;University of Kaiserslautern

  • Venue:
  • ECOOP'10 Proceedings of the 24th European conference on Object-oriented programming
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Concurrency in object-oriented languages is still waiting for a satisfactory solution. Formany application areas, standardmechanisms like threads and locks are too low level and have shown to be error-prone and notmodular enough. Lately the actor paradigm has regained attention as a possible solution to concurrency in OOLs. We propose JCoBox: a Java extension with an actor-like concurrencymodel based on the notion of concurrently running object groups, so-called coboxes. Communication is based on asynchronous method calls with standard objects as targets. Cooperative multi-tasking within coboxes allows for combining active and reactive behavior in a simple and safe way. Futures and promises lead to a data-driven synchronization of tasks. This paper describes the concurrency model, the formal semantics, and the implementation of JCoBox, and shows that the performance of the implementation is comparable to state-of-the-art actor-based language implementations for the JVM.