Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Declarative Concurrency In Java - A follow up

It's put up or shut up, right? I don't know if this is something I can do by myself, but I'm happy to try and get the ball rolling.

Some time ago, I wrote about declarative concurrency in Java. It seemed to get a good reaction from many people from different sections of the community. I wound up receiving a lot of email about how people were interested and how the idea of being able to define concurrency semantics in such a manner was appealing for a number of reasons. Well, I went ahead and stubbed out a project which I've pushed to github[1] for the world to pick at! It's minimal and there's very little there right now, but I wanted to solidify my intent to actually produce a prototype by physically creating the project and pushing it out there.

Everyone is welcome and encouraged to participate. The goal of the project will be to create a simple, open source, library in Java that will do the following.

  1. Allow developers to annotate methods, indicating that they may be executed in parallel.
  2. Provide a simple library that will, based on configuration and hints from the annotations, intercept invocations of the annotated methods and execute them concurrently.

I hope to get additional feedback on the concepts as well as the implementation as it evolves over time. Thanks to all who have provided feedback and encouragement thus far!

http://wiki.github.com/esammer/decothread

[1] - github.com - decothread project @ github

No comments: