The Fractal component model and ecosystem: supporting platforms, extensions and usages in real life
Tutorial T7
By: Jean-Bernard Stefani (INRIA) & Thierry Coupaye (FT R&D)
Abstract
Fractal is an advanced component model devised initially by France Telecom and INRIA and distributed by the ObjectWeb open source consortium since 2002 (http://fractal.objectweb.org). The tutorial will present in details the Fractal component model and introduce some elements of the Fractal ecosystem. The first part of the tutorial will detail the Fractal model itself, focusing on its original features: recursion with sharing, reflexive control, openness. The second part will introduce some execution supports (a.k.a. implementations) among the several existing in different languages and some extensions and tools above these platforms for instance for configuration (Fractal ADL), management (Fractal JMX), contract-based programming. The last part of the tutorial will provide a more complete view of the many works going on around Fractal inside the ObjectWeb open source community and some real usages of Fractal in industry.
Duration: Half day
Level and Required experience
This is an introductory tutorial. It explicitely targets newcomers into component-based programming in general and even more people who do not know Fractal yet. Intermediate and advanced users/developers are expected not to attend this tutorial but to participate to the Fractal workshop that is also submitted by the same people (T. Coupaye, J.-B. Stefani).
Speakers' profile
Thierry Coupaye in senior research expert at France Telecom R&D Division. He completed his PhD in Computer Science from the UJF Grenoble University, France, in 1996 in the area of active databases (Event-Condition-Action rules) and worked afterwards as a teaching and research assistant at INPG Technological University. Then he worked as a researcher at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in Cambridge, U.K., in the area of semi-structured data management for genomics, and then in the Dassault Systems and University of Grenoble Joint Laboratory where he worked on large scale software deployment. He joigned France Telecom in 2000. He lead several R&D projects in the database and software architecture areas and then took lead of the Distributed Software Architectures & Infrastructures Research Pole in 2003. He has been involved in several collaborative projects (Esprit Goodstep, ITEA Osmose, IST Artist). He is the author of more than 30 refereed articles and has participated in several program and organization committees of conferences in these areas (IDEAS, ETAPS, Euromicro, etc.). His current research interests include mipleware architecture, component-based systems, aspect-oriented programming and autonomic computing. He is co-editor of the Fractal component model specification and participates to the work around Fractal ADL, Fractal JMX, extensions for aspects (AOKell, FAC), integrity constraints, contracts.
Jean-Bernard Stefani is a research director at INRIA since 2001 where he heads the Sardes research team. Prior to that, he was the head of the Distributed Systems Laboratory in France Telecom R&D from 1995 to 2000. His research interests cover: distributed systems, operating systems, component-based systems, distributed and component-based programming, formal models for component-based and distributed programming. He is the author of more than 60 refereed papers and has participate in several program committees of international conferences (including Mipleware, SRDS, DAIS, Euromicro, FORTE, FMOODS, etc). He is co-editor of the Fractal component model specification and participates to the work around formalizing the model, Fractal ADL, the THINK implementation, the DREAM Fractal communication framework.
