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Section: New Software and Platforms
JOLIE
Java Orchestration Language Interpreter Engine
Keyword: Microservices
Scientific Description: Jolie enforces a strict separation of concerns between behaviour, describing the logic of the application, and deployment, describing the communication capabilities. The behaviour is defined using the typical constructs of structured sequential programming, communication primitives, and operators to deal with concurrency (parallel composition and input choice). Jolie communication primitives comprise two modalities of interaction typical of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs), namely one-way (sends an asynchronous message) and request-response (sends a message and waits for an answer). A main feature of the Jolie language is that it allows one to switch among many communication media and data protocols in a simple, uniform way. Since it targets the field of SOAs, Jolie supports the main communication media (TCP/IP sockets, Bluetooth L2CAP, Java RMI, and Unix local sockets) and data protocols (HTTP, JSON-RPC, XML-RPC, SOAP and their respective SSL versions) from this area.
Functional Description: Jolie is a language for programming service-oriented and microservice applications. It directly supports service-oriented abstractions such as service, port, and session. Jolie allows to program a service behaviour, possibly obtained by composing existing services, and supports the main communication protocols and data formats used in service-oriented architectures. Differently from other service-oriented programming languages such as WS-BPEL, Jolie is based on a user-friendly Java-like syntax (more readable than the verbose XML syntax of WS-BPEL). Moreover, the kernel of Jolie is equipped with a formal operational semantics. Jolie is used to provide proof of concepts around Focus activities.
Release Functional Description: There are many fixes to the HTTP extension, improvements to the embedding engine for Javascript programs, and improvements to the support tools jolie2java and wsdl2jolie.
News Of The Year: During 2018 Jolie was complemented by the creation of the JIoT project, aimed at integrating IoT-related technologies into the Jolie language. The final goal is to provide easy-to-use and flexible communication abstractions to interconnect and make interact disparate IoT islands. Jolie currently supports some of the main technologies used in SOAs (e.g., HTTP). However, only a limited amount of IoT devices uses the media and protocols already supported by Jolie. Indeed, protocols such as CoAP and MQTT, which are widely used in IoT scenarios, are not implemented in Jolie. Integrating these protocols, as we have done, is essential in order to allow Jolie programs to directly interact with the majority of IoT devices. We note that emerging frameworks for interoperability, such as the Web of Things, rely on the same protocols we mentioned for IoT, thus JIoT is also compliant with them. Concretely, work in 2018 comprised the inclusion of the CoAP/UDP and MQTT/TCP protocols among the communication technologies supported by the language. The Jolie implementation of MQTT and CoAP, as well as the UDP transport protocol used by CoAP, are based on the JAVA framework Netty.