Competitors or cousins? Studying the parallels between distributed programming languages systemJ and IEC61499

Sinha, R; Vyatkin, V; Salcic, Z; Park, HJ

Sinha, R; Vyatkin, V; Salcic, Z; Park, HJ

Abstract

We face a glut of languages for programming distributed software today. However, only a few languages have proven their potential with wider practical use in different domains of computing. We picked two such languages, meant for different domains, to see if they could cross-pollinate and enrich one another. Specifically, we chose SystemJ, a language to program distributed embedded systems, and IEC61499, the next generation standard for distributed industrial automation control software. Unsurprisingly, we found similar structures and artifacts between the two. We also found significant differences mainly due to differing domain-specific requirements. This comparison leads to observations and guidelines for improving both languages, and we discuss directions towards an “ideal” distributed software programming language.

Keywords

IEC 61499; SystemJ; Distributed programming; Concurrent programming

Date

September 19, 2014

Source

IEEE International Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation held at Barcelona School of Mathematics and Statistics, Barcelona, Spain, 2014-09-16 to 2014-09-19

Item Type

Conference Contribution

Publisher

Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. BarcelonaTech

Publisher's Version

http://www.etfa2014.org/etfa2014/program/ss04

Rights Statement

NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in (see Citation). The original publication is available at (see Publisher's Version).