Luca Zanolin

XMILE: An XML Based Approach for Incremental Code Mobility and Update

The eXtensible Markup Language (XML) was originally defined to represent Web content, but it is increasingly used to define languages, such as XPL, that are used for coding executable algorithms, policies or scripts. XML-related standards, such as XPath and the Document Object Model, permit the flexible manipulation of fragments of XML code, which enables novel code migration and update paradigms. The XMILE approach that we describe in this paper exploits these mechanisms in order to achieve flexible and fine-grained code updates, even without stopping execution. We describe a Java-based prototype that implements XMILE and our experience in using XMILE in the domain of code updates on mobile devices.

Modeling and Validation of Publish/Subscribe Architectures

The publish/subscribe component model is an emerging paradigm to support distributed systems composed of highly evolvable and dynamic federations of components. This paradigm eases the design of flexible architectures, but complicates their validation. It is easy to understand what each component does, but it is hard to foresee what the global federation achieves.

Model checking programmable router configurations

Programmable networks offer the ability to customize router behaviour at run time, thus increasing flexibility of network administration. Programmable network routers are configured using domain-specific languages. In this paper, we describe our approach to defining the syntax and semantics of such a domain-specific language. The ability to evolve router programs dynamically creates potential for misconfigurations. By exploiting domain-specific abstractions, we are able to translate router configurations into Promela and validate them using the Spin model checker, thus providing reasoning support for our domain-specific language. To evaluate our approach we use our configuration language to express the IETFs Differentiated Services specification and show that industrial-sized DiffServ router configurations can be validated using Spin on a standard PC.