Making windows more flexible

Reflective Java: Making Java Even More Flexible

Java has become popular as a programming language for the Internet because of its ability to simplify the development of flexible, portable applications with graphical user interfaces. Using Java, users can write a program once and run it on any platform. However, Java lacks a good mechanism to support integration of system software, which is required by new applications such as mobile computin...

Towards More Flexible Automatic Decision Making

Decision networks and decision trees are typical frameworks that underly most of the systems that are able to make automatic decisions under uncertainty. Decision networks are also known as influence diagrams and apply probabilistic inference among chance variables in a similar way as Bayesian networks. In addition, decision networks contain decision nodes and value nodes with associated utilit...

Making Systems More Robust with Flexible RPC Lookup

Modern distributed systems use names everywhere. Lockservices such as Chubby [1] and ZooKeeper [3] provide an effective mechanism for mapping from application names to server instances, but proper usage of them requires a large amount of error-prone boiler-plate code. Application programmers often try to write wrappers to abstract away this logic, but it turns out there is a more general and ea...

Making Infrastructure Procurement Processes more Flexible under Uncertainty

More Flexible Data Types

XML, as “the next generation ASCII”, can play several roles in a distributed object system; one of the more exciting ones is as the basis for serialized data representations. This is exciting because XML-encoded data can be more self-describing than data encoded in many more traditional ways, which facilitates the kind of decentralized protocol evolution seen in Internet-scale development: XML’...