Our demonstrator “Building Connected Car Applications on top of the World-Wide Streams Platform” received the Best Demo Award at DEBS 2017, the ACM conference on distributed and event-based systems.

The demo showcases the capabilities of World-wide Streams, a wide-area distributed stream processing platform that I helped build at Nokia Bell Labs. The demo is a fleet management application for connected cars, processing the telemetry data and dashcam video streams emitted by cars in real-time.

An extended abstract of the demo is available from the ACM digital library.

As part of his PhD thesis, my former PhD student Joeri De Koster has been deeply involved in actor languages and systems. Recently Joeri took the effort of transforming one of the chapters of his PhD thesis into a stand-alone paper that surveys different eminent actor systems and places them into a coherent taxonomy. He presented this work last month at the AGERE workshop at SPLASH, and to my surprise it actually got picked up by others quicky, for instance, by Tony Garnock-Jones, who wrote an excellent blog post on the history of actors, and by Phil Wadler in a recent paper.

Read more

I was invited to serve on the OOPSLA 2017 PC. OOPSLA seeks outstanding contributions on all aspects of programming languages and software engineering. The deadline for this year’s research papers is April 17th, 2017.

I recently switched from TextMate to Atom, a lightweight cross-platform text editor and thought it would be useful to write down how to configure the editor and various related tools to be productive with ECMAScript 6. It also shows how to set up tooling for TypeScript, a typed dialect of JavaScript, which aligns well with ECMAScript 6 and gives you optional static type checking and type inference. IMHO, if you’re going to invest in new tooling for ECMAScript 6, going the extra mile to switch to TypeScript is worth it.

Read more

This article surveys 10 libraries that I have found to be tremendously useful while developing back-end node.js services. They mostly address generic tasks that you will come across again and again: support for configuration, logging, processing command-line arguments, code coverage, asynchronous control flow, unit testing and more. While the focus is mostly on supporting back-end services, some of these libraries can equally well be used for front-end JavaScript development. I picked these 10 libraries based purely on personal experience and am documenting them in the hope they will prove useful to others.

The libraries are discussed in decreasing order of the number of Github stars they had at the time of writing this article, so more popular libraries are discussed first, and the lesser-known gems are discussed near the bottom. Don’t let this ranking trick you into thinking that this is a “top 10” article: I’m not comparing these libraries against one another.

Enough intro, let’s get started!

Read more