Why Protelis?
Developing networked systems is really hard. To make a good resilient system, you generally need to bring three types of expertise to bear all at once in the same code:
- Expertise regarding the actual purpose of the system
- Networking expertise, to manage the interactions between individual devices
- Distributed algorithms expertise, to ensure that the collective behavior is desirable and resilient to all sorts of failures and system changes
This "aggregate programming" problem, of obtaining resilient collective behavior from local interactions between machines, has been with us ever since people started networking computers. In some specialized areas, such as cloud computing and GPU programming, there a simple and regular network architecture has already led to good aggregate programming methods (e.g., MapReduce).
The goal of the Protelis language is to make resilient networked systems just as easy to build for complex and heterogeneous networks as for single machines and cloud systems. This accomplished by separating the different tasks and making some of the hard and subtle parts automatic and implicit. A few of the key design decisions behind Protelis are:
- Protelis is a language because there are a lot of subtle and easy ways to break a distributed system. Creating a language (rather than just a library) lets some of these be handled implicitly, so there is no opportunity to make mistakes.
- Protelis is hosted in and integrated with Java to let it be very lightweight take advantage of the large pre-existing ecosystem of Java infrastructure and libraries.
- Protelis looks as much like Java as practical in order to make it easier to learn and adopt.
- Protelis ensures safe and resilient composition because its core is field calculus, a theoretical model of aggregate programming much like lambda calculus is for functional programming.
Further reading / references:
-
Protelis:
Practical Aggregate Programming,
Danilo Pianini, Mirko Viroli, Jacob Beal, ACM Symposium on
Applied Computing 2015, April 2015.
The first scientific paper presenting Protelis and example applications -
Distributed Recovery for Enterprise Services
Shane S. Clark, Jacob Beal, Partha Pal, 9th IEEE International
Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems, to
appear September 2015.
Protelis applied to fast, low-impact automated recovery of enterprise systems -
A
Calculus of Computational Fields, Mirko Viroli,
Ferruccio Damiani, and Jacob Beal, 12th International Workshop
on Foundations of Coordination Languages and Self Adaptive
Systems (FOCLASA'13), September 2013.
Field calculus is the mathematical/theoretical foundation of Protelis -
Code
Mobility Meets Self-Organisation: a Higher-order Calculus of
Computational Fields, Ferruccio Damiani, Mirko Viroli,
Danilo Pianini, and Jacob Beal, Formal Techniques for
Distributed Objects, Components, and Systems, pp. 113-128,
June 2015.
Higher-order field calculus lets Protelis have first-class functions -
Space-time
Programming, Jacob Beal and Mirko Viroli, Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society A, Volume 373, Issue 2046,
pages 20140220, June 2015.
Larger picture of field calculus and general approach to aggregate programming, with a focus on spatially-distributed systems -
Organizing the
Aggregate: Languages for Spatial Computing
Jacob Beal, Stefan Dulman, Kyle Usbeck, Mirko Viroli, and
Nikolaus Correll, chapter in "Formal and Practical Aspects of
Domain-Specific Languages: Recent Developments", ed. Marjan
Mernik, IGI Global, December 2012.
A survey of other aggregate programming approaches, with a focus on spatially-distributed networks
Developing with Protelis
Contributing to Protelis
Protelis is a free and open project that welcomes additional contributions. The source is available on GitHub at: https://github.com/Protelis
If you want to help improve Protelis, just dive in, fork a copy of this code, and get started! Development customs follow a standard GitHub workflow: get things working in your own branch, then request pull integration. The file README.developer contains information about setting up development and contributing.
Current build status of Protelis:
| Protelis |  |
Test details | FindBugs reporting | All build reports |
| Protelis-Parser |  |
History and Trivia
Protelis emerged from the synthesis of several prior projects:
- Proto, an aggregate programming language created by Jacob Beal and Jonathan Bachrach.
- Field calculus, a distillation of aggregate programming models by Mirko Viroli, Ferruccio Damiani, and Jacob Beal
- The Alchemist Simulator project, led by Danilo Pianini and Mirko Viroli.
The first version of Protelis was designed jointly during the summer of 2014 by Jacob Beal, Danilo Pianini, and Mirko Viroli, with the first implementation carried out primarily by Danilo Pianini.
The name "Protelis," a Latin word which translates approximately as "regarding a team," was chosen to reflect both its nature as an aggregate language and its derivation from Proto.