| Declarative Networking: Language, Execution and Optimization | Superb | |
| Boon Thau Loo, Tyson Condie, Minos Garofalakis, David E. Gay, Joseph M. Hellerstein, Petros Maniatis, Raghu Ramakrishnan, Timothy Roscoe, Ion Stoica | ||
More than a decade after it was declared dead, recursive query processing is back again. Modern network protocols are complex, and recursive. Their properties are often not well-understood. Protocol definitions, in almost every case, are procedural. Declarative protocol specification can raise the level of discourse, simplify analysis, and permit more efficient implementations: doing for networks what declarative query specification has done for databases. This paper describes a declarative specification of network protocols using recursion. It is the paper, in a sequence of papers studying different aspects of this problem, that is most accessible to a database audience. I don't know whether the proposed declarative specifications suffice to capture enough of the behavior of real prot! ocols to be of value to systems builders. But the ideas are compelling, and the impact, if the idea pans out, is huge. | ||