Homo Sapiens Abstractus

While trying to write the “About Me” comment you can see in the sidebar, I remembered that a while ago (~2K?) I had proposed to my MSc advisor a research approach to flexible and more “open-minded” software.

The idea is that after you come up with a basic understanding of your problem area and pin down some basic requirements, you start building a kernel or a microkernel supporting the desired features. Everything else should come on top of that in the form of layers. Of course, operating systems work that way, and this is what gave me the idea.

In a previous paper of mine “Digital Typography in the New Millenium: Flexible Documents by a Flexible Engine“, I had proposed such an approach for an extensible next-generation typesetting engine (… those were the years I played around with LaTeX…). Unfortunately, due to lack of resources, these ideas have never transformed into coding, apart from some very early, unpublished attempts.

I have followed the same path in the paper “Non-stop Provision of Internet Services via a Reflectively Load-Sharing Architecture“, where the foundation of a meta-shell approach to programming with DSLs was publicly laid down. This time, my initial prototype in Python was almost feature-complete and the ideas in the paper were all implemented and tested. In the line of this proposal, I am continuing the project in Java. This time, I WILL make the source code publicly accessible and - of course - with an Open Source license. For now, I am preparing the supporting libraries under the ckkl-core project.

“Unfortunately” :-), the more I think about it, the more I become more and more certain that I basically follow this idea of (micro)kernel-based approach to building middleware (and software in general) in the whole line of my research and professional activities. My intention was to lay down the idea in this post, not to enumerate my countfull (cf. with the perfectly legal English word countless) papers. Probably I will speak more of them later on….