Prototyping Concurrent Systems with Agents and Artifacts: Framework and Core Calculus

More and more aspects of concurrency and concurrent programming are becoming part of mainstream programming and software engineering, due to several factors such as the widespread availability of multi-core / parallel architectures and Internet-based systems. Besides the typical fine-grained support currently provided, however, we seek in this paper for an higher-level approach. We present simpA, a library-based extension of Java which provides programmers with agent and artifact abstractions on top of the basic OO layer, as a means to organise and structure concurrent applications. To pave the way towards identifying a true language extension for simpA, we define a core calculus of agents and artifacts, by suitabling mixing techniques coming from object-orientation and concurrency theory.