Research Work Carried Out by Students (Hofer03)

Andreas Hofer.
Process Types in Java.
Theses, Institute of Computer Languages, Vienna University of Technology, 2003.

Abstract:

Process types are types that encode message sequences. They can be used for concurrent programming where many clients need to be synchronized. While common synchronization mechanism mainly depend on features provided by the operating system, process types allow synchronization already at the type system level. Currently, no programmming language has been developed or extended to support process types. This work is a first step of the appliance of process types in object-oriented programming languages. We extend Java, a well known strongly-typed object-oriented programming languages, with language features that implement the semantics of process types. The focus lies in basic modifications to the syntax and semantics, including both the compiled and interpreted elements of the language. Wherever necessary, we use a formal model based on abstract data types in combination with natural semantics to describe implementation details. This thesis shows that Java ca be extended to support process types, however, not all theory aspects of process types can be integrated. Especially static type checking is limited. Aspects of Java that are implemented in the language API, for example serialization or reflection, are not considered in this work.

@MastersThesis{Hofer03,
  author  = {Andreas Hofer},
  title   = {Process Types in {J}ava},
  school  = {Institute of Computer Languages, Vienna University of Technology},
  year    = 2003,
  address = {Vienna, Austria}
}