The Reaction Vessel

The Reaction Vessel is a Java programming framework whose primary control mechanism is based on the chemical metaphor. The system treats programs and data as objects interacting in a virtual reaction vessel. Benefits of the Reaction Vessel include automatic concurrency, fault tolerance, and a novel way for programmers to view the solution to certain classes of problems.

The Reaction Vessel Overview is a brief presentation on the system.

"The Reaction Vessel: A General-Purpose Programming Framework Based on the Chemical Metaphor" is a 2010 International Conference on Software Engineering Theory and Practice paper. In addition to describing the system, it also casts the Reaction Vessel as an artificial chemistry, which gives a precise definition of Reaction Vessel semantics.

Abstract The chemical metaphor, where some control aspects of a computational system are analogous to real chemistry, can provide a novel programming environment that provides features such as automatic concurrency and fault tolerance. It has been used in a number of systems based on such formalisms as the lambda calculus and rewrite rules in areas including distributed computing and network protocols. The Reaction Vessel extends the chemical metaphor to a general-purpose Java programming framework. To illustrate the features of the Reaction Vessel, a simple web crawler constructed from virtual molecules is described.

Additional programmer documentation is being developed.

The Reaction Vessel code will be available in the future.