Programming language design for service-oriented systems

Abstract

Designing systems in a service-oriented manner, in which application features are decoupled and run as independently executing services over a network, is becoming more commonplace and popular. Service-oriented programming provides a natural way to model and manage many types of systems and allows software development teams to achieve operational flexibility, scalability, and reliability in a cost-effective manner. In particular, it has been used quite successfully for Web and mobile applications. However, building, deploying, and maintaining service-oriented systems is challenging and requires extensive planning, more effort during development, a detailed understanding of advanced networking techniques, and the use of complicated concurrent programming. This thesis presents a new programming language called Silo. Silo integrates features that address key conceptual and pragmatic needs of service-oriented systems that, holistically, are not easily satisfied by existing languages. Broadly, these needs include: a unified distributed programming model, a simple yet ecient construct for concurrency, a familiar yet extensible syntax, and the ability to interoperate with a rich ecosystem of libraries and tools. In this dissertation, I describe how Silo's features, constructs, and conventions satisfy these needs. Then, I present various compiler and runtime techniques used in Silo's implementation. Lastly, I provide a demonstration, through a variety of programming patterns and applications, of how Silo facilitates the design, implementation, and management of service-oriented systems.