The Fractal Project
Background image appears courtesy of
Giuseppe Zito.
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OW2 Technology Council Special Prize for ProActive-CLIF-Fractal integration.
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Project Description
Fractal is a modular, extensible and programming
language agnostic component model
that can be used to design, implement, deploy and
reconfigure systems and applications, from operating
systems to middleware platforms and to graphical user
interfaces. The goal of Fractal is to reduce the
development, deployment and maintenance costs of
software systems in general, and of ObjectWeb projects
in particular.
The Fractal component model has the following important
features:
-
recursivity:
components can be nested in
composite
components (hence the "Fractal" name).
-
reflectivity:
components have full introspection and
intercession capabilities.
-
component sharing:
a given component instance can be included (or
shared) by more than one component. This is useful
to model shared resources such as memory manager or
device drivers for instance.
-
binding components:
a single abstraction for components connections
that is called
bindings.
Bindings can embed any communication semantics
from synchronous method calls to remote procedure
calls
-
execution model independence:
no execution
model is imposed. In that, components can be run within
other execution models than the classical
thread-based model such as event-based models and so
on.
-
open:
extra-functional services associated to a
component can be customized through the notion of a
control membrane.
Programming Languages Support
The Fractal Component Model is available for various
programming languages:
Reference implementations:
Other implementations:
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