Applications = Components + Scripts - A Tour of Piccola
Franz Achermann, Oscar Nierstrasz · Open Access CRIS of the University of Bern
Piccola is a language for composing applications from software components. It has a small syntax and a minimal set of features needed for specifying different styles of software composition. The core features of Piccola are communicating agents, which perform computations, and forms, which are the communicated values. Forms are a special notion of extensible, immutable records. Forms and agents allow us to unify components, static and dynamic contexts and arguments for invoking services. Through a series of examples, we present a tour of Piccola, illustrating how forms and agents suffice to express a variety of compositional abstractions and styles.