Scaling Database Languages to Higher-Order Distributed Programming

We describe the Tycoon approach to scale the successful notion of a uniform, type-safe persistent object store to communication-intensive applications and applications where long-term activities are allowed to span multiple autonomous network sites. Exploiting stream-based data, code and thread exchange primitives we present several distributed programming idioms in Tycoon. These programming patterns range from client-server communication based on polymorphic higher-order remote procedure calls to migrating autonomous agents that are bound dynamically to network resources present at individual network nodes. Following Tycoon’ s add-on approach, these idioms are not cast into built-in syntactic forms, but are expressed by characteristic programming patterns exploiting communication primitives encapsulated by library functions. Moreover, we present a novel form of binding support for ubiquitous resources which drastically reduces communication trafficfor modular distributed applications.

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