RaScript: Declarative Programming Framework for IoT Resource Management

Overview:

Resource management is a very important and inevitable work when we develop smart device systems or applications. There are diverse resources in smart devices, such as cameras, storage, networks, remote devices, and so on. Usually, device resources are updated rapidly due to the development of technology.In the common application scenario, resource management is very complex.we often need combine multiple resources to satisfy the user's needs, for example，when users take Photo, it normally requires the camera to be turned on and the photos to be stored locally or in the cloud.

The traditional development way of resource management is imperative. However,The imperative development paradigm focuses too much on implementation details, requiring implementation of each step, management of each state transition, and a lot of exception handling code. This style of programming is more demanding on programmers which leads to code bloat, making code refactoring and debugging more difficult. The emergence of declarative development paradigms can work well to deal with the problems caused by imperative programming.

Declarative programming frees the programmer from the tedious details of code implementation and prioritizes the logic, while leaving control implementation automatically to the system. Compared to imperative programming, declarative programming is simpler, easier to read, and easier to implement. However, nowdays declarative programming is usually used in UI implementations, such as React, Vue, Flutter, SwiftUI, Compose, ArkUI and so on. Declarative resource management frameworks are only applied in some specific scenarios or specific domains, and there is no available declarative programming framework for complex and diverse smart device resources.

The goal of the declarative programming of resource management project is to apply the declarative programming technology in resource management of smart device. To be specific, this project aims to:

Study the implementation means of declarative resource and UI management;
Provide a prototype declarative programming framework for resource management.

Publications:

Members:

Qiliang Fan
Baojian Hua
Jincheng Liu
Wanrong Ouyang
Zhizhong Pan
Meng Wu

Computer Systems & Security Group, USTC