Concurrent object-oriented programming with agent-oriented abstractions: the ALOO approach

Abstract

A long-standing problem in concurrent object-oriented programming is finding a sound and effective way to integrate active entities - being them actors, active objects, processes - with plain passive objects. Even if the problem is quite old, this is still an open issue: different kinds of approaches have been proposed in literature - also recently - each bringing some benefits and drawbacks. In this paper we describe a proposal based on agent-oriented abstractions, called ALOO. ALOO can be conceived as a conservative extension of sequential OOP languages, so plain old objects, adopting agents and agent organizations as first-class abstractions to model the active side of systems, encapsulating the decentralized control. ALOO is an evolution of a previous model/language called simpAL - an agent-oriented programming approach - towards to concurrent object-oriented programming.