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Bristlecone: Language Support for Robust Software Applications
January/February 2011 (vol. 37 no. 1)
pp. 4-23
ASCII Text
x 
 
Brian Demsky, Sivaji R. Sundaramurthy, "Bristlecone: Language Support for Robust Software Applications," IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 4-23, January/February, 2011.
 
 
BibTex
x
 
@article{ 10.1109/TSE.2010.27,
author = {Brian Demsky and Sivaji R. Sundaramurthy},
title = {Bristlecone: Language Support for Robust Software Applications},
journal ={IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering},
volume = {37},
number = {1},
issn = {0098-5589},
year = {2011},
pages = {4-23},
doi = {http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/TSE.2010.27},
publisher = {IEEE Computer Society},
address = {Los Alamitos, CA, USA},
}
 
 
RefWorks Procite/RefMan/Endnote
x 
 
TY - JOUR
JO - IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
TI - Bristlecone: Language Support for Robust Software Applications
IS - 1
SN - 0098-5589
SP4
EP23
EPD - 4-23
A1 - Brian Demsky,
A1 - Sivaji R. Sundaramurthy,
PY - 2011
KW - Software robustness.
VL - 37
JA - IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
ER -
 
Brian Demsky, University of California, Irvine, Irvine
Sivaji R. Sundaramurthy, University of California, Irvine, Irvine
We present Bristlecone, a programming language for robust software systems. Bristlecone applications have two components: a high-level organization specification that describes how the application's conceptual operations interact and a low-level operational specification that describes the sequence of instructions that comprise an individual conceptual operation. Bristlecone uses the high-level organization specification to recover the software system from an error to a consistent state and to reason how to safely continue the software system's execution after the error. We have implemented a compiler and runtime for Bristlecone. We have evaluated this implementation on three benchmark applications: a Web crawler, a Web server, and a multiroom chat server. We developed both a Bristlecone version and a Java version of each benchmark application. We used injected failures to evaluate the robustness of each version of the application. We found that the Bristlecone versions of the benchmark applications more successfully survived the injected failures. The Bristlecone compiler contains a static analysis that operates on the organization specification to generate a set of diagrams that graphically present the task interactions in the application. We have used the analysis to help understand the high-level structure of three Bristlecone applications: a game server, a Web server, and a chat server.

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Index Terms:
Software robustness.
Citation:
Brian Demsky, Sivaji R. Sundaramurthy, "Bristlecone: Language Support for Robust Software Applications," IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 4-23, Jan.-Feb. 2011, doi:10.1109/TSE.2010.27
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