Marketplace: A language for network-aware programming

We are happy to announce the release of Marketplace, a new programming language for building functional network programs. Marketplace combines two fundamental ideas in a new way: nested virtual machines and publish/subscribe messaging. Nesting allows programs to isolate processes and to delimit conversations. While publish/subscribe generalizes point-to-point and broadcast messaging, it smoothly turns the appearance and disappearance of participants and resources into presence and absence messages. Such messages make it particularly easy to start and stop services and to manage resources based on demand.

Here is a simple TCP echo server written in Marketplace:

#lang marketplace

(endpoint #:subscriber (tcp-channel ? (tcp-listener 5999) ?)

#:conversation (tcp-channel from to _)

#:on-presence (spawn #:child (echoer from to)))

;; echoer: TcpAddress TcpAddress -> Transition

(define (echoer from to)

(transition stateless

(endpoint #:subscriber (tcp-channel from to ?)

#:on-absence (quit)

[(tcp-channel _ _ data)

(send-message (tcp-channel to from data))])))

The initial endpoint subscribes to TCP messages on port 5999. When a conversational partner appears, the endpoint spawns a new process that runs an echoer process. The latter is stateless and subscribes to TCP messages. When it gets messages with payload data, it sends them back out with the opposite addressing; when the TCP conversation disappears, it quits.

Thus far, we have built several real systems using Marketplace: a DNS server, a DNS proxy, and an SSH server. The DNS proxy has handled DNS traffic for ourselves and other members of our lab for the last several months.

You can read an overview along with detailed documentation for Marketplace at http://tonyg.github.io/marketplace/.

To get the sources for Marketplace as well as the applications point your browser to https://github.com/tonyg/marketplace.

Enjoy!

Tony Garnock-Jones

Sam Tobin-Hochstadt

Matthias Felleisen

Racket v5.3.4

Racket version 5.3.4 is now available from

http://racket-lang.org/

• Extflonums (80-bit floating-point numbers) are supported on some x86/x86_64 platforms — including Windows, and including platforms where Racket is compiled to use SSE instructions for flonum arithmetic. Thanks to Michael Filonenko.
• OS X: DrRacket and all of the other apps are now signed with an official key.
• Tally Maze: a new game based an enumeration of 2d mazes.
• The Optimization Coach, a DrRacket plugin, has been moved from the Racket distribution to the Racket package repository. Install it with: raco pkg install optimization-coach.
• Redex: define-union-language now merges productions when languages define the same nonterminals. Thanks to William Bowman.
• The srfi/19 library is now compatible with the date structure type exported by racket/base.

RacketCon 2013

We are pleased to announce that (third RacketCon) will take place on September 29, 2013 at Northeastern University in Boston.  This year, we plan to bring in several speakers from industry, as well as host talks from Racket developers and users.

Lunch will be provided.

On the Saturday (28th) before RacketCon, we plan to hold a hackathon to work on various Racket projects.

Registration will open during the summer, and we will post a detailed schedule of events around the same time. The conference website is at

http://con.racket-lang.org/