[PRL] HydroJ from UW

[Karl Lieberherr]

HydroJ

http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/projects/cecil/www/pubs/hydroj.html

addresses the brittle parameter problem to make software more resilient
to interface changes.

The approach uses semi-structured data, patterns and handlers
and service classes.

Here is a nice quote from the paper:

4.4 Adaptive programming
Adaptive programming [36] and the HydroJ type system
share a similar motivation: namely, to enable components
to be written in a way that makes them relatively robust
to changes in their peers. Adaptive programming, however,
is considerably more radical than HydroJ: it insulates
clients from changes to the structure of object's reference
graph, by providing traversal patterns that mediate between
clients and graphs of objects. The XPath [58] query
language can be viewed as an XML analogue of adaptive
programming patterns: it also decouples the client from the
details of traversing and extracting parts of an XML value.
HydroJ does not incorporate adaptive programming constructs,
but combining semi-structured data with expressive
traversal patterns at the programming language level might
yield interesting results.

Fabio Rojas is working in this space.

November 2, 2004.