Section: New Software and Platforms

Jolie

Members of Focus have developed Jolie [8] (Java Orchestration Language Interpreter Engine, see http://www.jolie-lang.org/ ). Jolie is a service-oriented programming language. Jolie can be used to program services that interact over the Internet using different communication protocols. Differently from other Web Services programming languages such as WS-BPEL, Jolie is based on a user-friendly C/Java-like syntax (more readable than the verbose XML syntax of WS-BPEL) and, moreover, the language is equipped with a formal operational semantics. This language is used for the proof of concepts developed around Focus activities. For instance, contract theories can be exploited for checking the conformance of a Jolie program with respect to a given contract. A spin-off, called “Italiana Software”, has been launched around Jolie, its general aim is to transfer the expertise in formal methods for Web Services matured in the last few years onto Service Oriented Business Applications. The spin-off is a software producer and consulting company that offers service-oriented solutions (for instance, a “single sign-on” application) based on the Jolie language.

During 2014, the development of Jolie 1.1 has been completed (the release is due for the first half of January 2015). It is the result of about 600 commits, including more than 30 new standard library APIs, 100 bugfixes, and 100 improvements to the Jolie interpreter and libraries. Highlights:

• A new hierarchical semantics for handling sub-programs loaded in higher-order Jolie services.

• Support for "abstract locations". This enables the writing of extensions that automatically fetch the bindings to the external services needed by a Jolie program. We plan to use this feature to develop binding procedures that ensure correctness.

• Introduction of a tracer option for the Jolie interpreter, which displays the execution trace of a Jolie program (useful for debugging).

• Substantial improvements to memory management of higher-order programs.

• Improved integration with web applications, which supports new techniques for handling the evolution of legacy web applications using the composition primitives of Jolie.

Moreover Jolie Enterprise has been released: this is an administrative tool that allows one to deploy Jolie services on remote nodes. Jolie Enterprise is able to manage services that run on different nodes on different machines, tracking all messages exchanged between services and viewing the log on GUI so that one can have a report of what happened in the system. Currently there are about 15 installations of Jolie Enterprise at SME in clothing, construction and manufacturing.